Errol Morris

American film director, screenwriter, producer, author and newspaper columnist who has made close to a dozen documentary features and a number of television series, commercials and short films since 1978.

July 19, 2014 06:52 pm | Updated November 17, 2021 12:23 pm IST

Errol Morris

Errol Morris

WHO is he?

American film director, screenwriter, producer, author and newspaper columnist who has made close to a dozen documentary features and a number of television series, commercials and short films since 1978.

Morris studied history and philosophy formally before taking up filmmaking. He won the Academy award for his 2003 film The Fog Of War and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for A Brief History Of Time (1991).

WHY is he of interest?

Morris’ methods of blurring the line between reality and fiction have called into question the ethics of documentary filmmaking. However, what his films arrive at is not a straightforward detailing of facts and figures, but at a higher philosophical or social truth. Morris has frequently expressed his conviction that truth is not subjective and one could always reach it through rigorous investigation. True to his belief, his film The Thin Blue Line was instrumental in the acquittal of its wrongly-accused subject.

WHERE to discover him?

Although perhaps not his best work, Tabloid (2010) is a fascinating melting pot of many of Morris’ preoccupations — self-mythologizing oddball characters, conflicting versions of truth, the inherently intrusive, non-objective nature of the camera, journalistic investigation — and comes across as a fitting marriage between the subject matter of tabloid reporting and Morris’ own preoccupation with cultural miscellanea.

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