Errol Morris

:) Errol Morris, the film-maker, was on campus last week and gave an excellent talk titled "Cinema, Photography, and Lying". Unlike other talks and discussions about this issue, he didnt take the philosopher's approach of starting with the semantic tar-pit of trying to define "truth" (I was greatly thankful for that!). Instead he talked about his deliberate anti-cinema verite approach to documentary making and using various film-clips and witty anecdotes by the end of the talk he had engaged with this issue in a very interesting way.

The key message that he emphasized was that human beings have an incredible capability for self-deception (yes that includes me and you, good reader), clogged up in a psychological morass of rationalizations, motivations, values and such. It was the strange absurdity of this that he sought to explore in all his documentaries (the clips he had were mainly from The Fog of War:Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and Vernon, Florida). In all of these films, as viewers we can see that the central characters seem to reveal an inordinate level of self-deception leaving us wondering -- how could anybody so thoroughly deceive themselves and have such beliefs, when further inquiry would reveal that the facts unambiguously indicate otherwise.

So his thesis is less about the ultimate questions of truth (i.e. whether it exists) but more about the pragmatics of it i.e. a person's capability to challenge the accuracy of his/her own beliefs and conception of the world and to place it under serious scrutiny. To illustrate it, he had a funny re-rendering of Santayana's observation -- "those who forget the past, are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility".

To summarize my understanding of all this, here's an example, suppose I have a red apple in a brown paper bag. Now Bob comes along and asks me what the color of the apple is, as he cannot see it through the brown paper bag. Now, I could deliberately lie to him and say that the apple is green in color, fully knowing that it was actually red. This is a vastly different scenario from the following situation where Bob comes along and to the same question I insist that the apple is green. Now all I need to do verify if I am right is to open the bag and see that the apple is actually red. However even after seeing that it is red if I continue to fervently believe it is green (and would even swear in court that it was so) then this situation begins to border on the absurd. When we map {apple, Bob, and me} in different ways to {films, film-makers, viewers}, we begin to see Morris' take on films, truth and it's relation to us the viewers.