Classic Flicks: Morris' Gates of Heaven

By Joseph Allencherril     10/21/10 7:00pm

German filmmaker Werner Herzog promised to eat his shoe if friend and fellow filmmaker Errol Morris were to complete his documentary on pet cemeteries and have it shown in theaters. Sure enough, Gates of Heaven - Morris' feature debut - was released in 1978, forcing Herzog to eat both his words and his shoe. Interested viewers can actually watch Herzog eat his shoe, boiled to perfection in garlic and herbs, in Les Blank's aptly named short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Gates of Heaven is a series of interviews centered on the shutdown of Floyd McClure's Foothill Pet Cemetery in Los Altos, Calif. and the subsequent transfer of the buried pets to Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa Valley. The film is not narrated, and the story is told through the words of Morris' interviewees telling their pet stories. I never expected to find so much honest wisdom on life, eternity, love and death in the monologues of the pet cemetery owners, pet owners and pet lovers. Humor, philosophy and irony support Morris' film throughout - to say that Gates of Heaven is a movie about pet cemeteries is to misunderstand Morris' work. Great works of art begin with the specific and end in the realm of universal truths.

In spite of Morris' seemingly grim material, I believe that pet lovers will actually enjoy this film. But I will issue this warning: If you are a pet owner (or a human being with a pulse) you may cry while watching this movie. If you are a former pet owner, you will have finished a box of Kleenexes by the end of the film.

Morris' ear for the poetic in common speech allows him to assemble interviews in such a way that his nonfictional documentaries always seem to have the thread of a story running through them. His subjects feel so real because they are. The characters are not made up, nor are they reading from a script - these men and women are real and exist in the flesh. They are not forced to talk but are compelled to. One bereaved dog owner remarks, "There's your dog; your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn't it?" Now there's a statement that would make Plato weep.

---

---

Morris, instead of conducting face-to-face interviews, uses the Interrotron, a device which projects the image of his face onto the camera. He is able to extract such moving performances - if one might call them performances - from his subjects. He rarely intrudes into his films. Morris understands the primal human need to express oneself and to be heard, saying: "The element of spontaneity is not knowing what someone is going to say to me in front of the camera, having really no idea, of being surprised. I know that there's this moment in all of the interviews that I've loved where something happens. I had this three-minute rule that if you just shut up and let someone talk, within three minutes they will show you how crazy they really are."

Morris seeks life and truth in his subjects. As such, he is one of the few documentary filmmakers who can bring an audience to tears. Audiences' traditional apathy toward the documentary film is a cultural sickness that can be easily remedied by watching Morris' films.

Author's note: Pet- and film-lovers: If you are in the mood for a moving arthouse film about a man and his dog, I recommend seeing Fellini's 1952 film Umberto D.

Joseph Allencherril is a Will Rice College sophomore. Classic Flicks is a column rediscovering the best films that cinema has to offer.

---