While Morris himself was not in attendance, many distinguished UW film professors were: J.J. Murphy, Kristen Thompson, David Bordwell, and Vance Kepley. I took Kepley's History of Documentary Film class.
Plantinga began by defining the big word,"anosognosis". It means being ignorant of your ignorance and he posited that Morris feels this is part of the human condition. With these prefatory remarks done, he got to the meat of his lecture which was divided into seven parts. I won't go over each one individually but will hit the highlights.
First is the claim that Morris is interested in what Plantinga called "mindscapes". Morris is interested in people; their beliefs, their motivations for their beliefs, and their obsessions. He wants to know how his subjects view the world. This was followed by a look at Morris' epistemological leanings. Far from being a post-modernist, he believes that objective truth exists but that it is not always easy to get at it though that shouldn't stop us from trying.
Plantinga also addressed the style of Morris' films. He uses his Interrotron, device that allows Morris and his subject to look directly at each other and the subject to look directly into the camera. Here the importance of the face was brought up. If Morris wants to get to know about the interior states of people, then his best bet is to look at people's faces because it is expressive of them. The interview is an important tool because it shows how things were said (vs. simply reading people's words) and it puts the interviewee into context. As an example, Plantinga showed a frame from Gates of Heaven (either that or Vernon, Florida) which showed a man behind his desk. You've got his nameplate, trophies he'd won, etc. We see him in his element.
This is relevant to a later section of the lecture that was entitled "The Five Hundred ton Fly On the Wall". We were told that Morris rejects the attempt of cinéma vérité to use unobtrusiveness as a means to guarantee truth. Whatever claims people like Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, etc. might have made in the 1960s about the effectiveness of their style in capturing "truth", I have to wonder just who among the cinéma vérité/direct cinema (I prefer the latter term when speaking about American directors) crowd today doesn't feel the presence of the camera has an impact. I don't have any quotes but I highly suspect we're at the point of recognizing that people comport themselves differently in front of a camera.
Plantinga said that direct cinema looks at "surface truths" and cannot approach people's interior states as Morris likes to do. I think this privileging of Morris' style is to sell direct cinema short. Go back to Plantinga's comments on the use of interview above. Firstly, there's nothing inherent in direct cinema that precludes close-ups and prevents using a subject's face to help determine interior states. Here's a couple frames form DC. First is from Robert Drew's Primary and the second from Frederick Wiseman's Hospital.
Direct cinema abandons the interview but, in return, we get to see not only the subject in context (remember the bit above about the guy behind his desk) but we also see people acting within their element. They are not just static figures behind a desk answering questions, they sit behind their desks, get up and walk around, interact with other people in the office, etc. Direct cinema has the virtue of letting subject be active whereas an interview is by necessity about having a passive subject. Morris' style and direct cinema are certainly different but I don't think this means that the latter is unable to ascertain interior states.
I'm not trying to put one style above the other but instead saying that they are simply different. They both have ways of getting at "truth" and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Despite my disagreement here, Plantinga's lecture was a great Errol Morris primer. He talked about the director's concerns and obsessions along with the stylistic trappings that he uses to pursue them.
It wasn't until the thing was over that I thought of a question to ask. The final question during the Q&A was about the music in Morris' films. It was a good question because Plantinga's talk was about Morris as an auteur and rightly so. But his films are collaborations. Others write the scores and I was keen on asking about Morris' choice of cinematographers.
How does he choose them and what do they bring to the table? Cinematographer Robert Richardson's prints are all over Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. You've got the different film stocks and the really bright floods in some shots. It seems like he had a lot of input. How does Richardson compare to Robert Chappell, the DP who has shot most of Morris' other films?
Morris addressed this a little bit in his speech at the Union, which I'll blather on about later.
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