I won the new Errol Morris DVD set from Landmark Theatres, along with the complete set of his “First Person” series. The only thing I’d seen in the box set was The Thin Blue Line, so I’m working my way through the set.
First up is Gates of Heaven, Morris’ 1980 documentary about pet cemeteries. I was a bit underwhelmed by it, I have to admit, but it grew on me. Morris doesn’t include any narration in his documentaries, so it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of what’s going on. The movie opens with one man who’s talking about a pet cemetery he started, a bunch of other unidentified men talk about it, plus there’s some dick from a rendering plant interjecting heartless comments from time to time, then the first guy starts talking about how his cemetery closed and he had to move the animals… and suddenly we’re at a whole different cemetery with a whole different set of people. And I don’t think the second cemetery was the one that took the first cemetery’s disinterred pets, because it seemed to have a different name. So it was a bit confusing. But those details are sort of beside the point anyway – the point is to watch these people. The ‘70s fashions add a nice touch, and the people on camera are completely untainted by the pervasive self-consciousness of our reality-show era, when just about everyone is clearly thinking about how they will appear on camera.
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