Errol Morris

Recounts the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case and how it reflects shortcomings in the justice system, drawing on court transcripts, lab reports, and original interviews to consider the plausibility of MacDonald's innocence.

The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald

A Wilderness of Error

In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in this investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs.

Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

Believing is Seeing

In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result. At the time, Morris was a graduate student. Now we know him as one of the most celebrated and restlessly probing filmmakers of our time, the creator of such classics of documentary investigation as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. Kuhn, meanwhile, was—and, posthumously, remains—a star in his field, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a landmark book that has sold well over a million copies and introduced the concept of “paradigm shifts” to the larger culture. And Morris thought the idea was bunk. The Ashtray tells why—and in doing so, it makes a powerful case for Morris’s way of viewing the world, and the centrality to that view of a fundamental conception of the necessity of truth. “For me,” Morris writes, “truth is about the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence idea of truth.” He has no patience for philosophical systems that aim for internal coherence and disdain the world itself. Morris is after bigger game: he wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions. Rather, Morris argues powerfully, it is our duty to do everything we can to establish and support it. In a time when truth feels ever more embattled, under siege from political lies and virtual lives alike, The Ashtray is a bracing reminder of its value, delivered by a figure who has, over decades, uniquely earned our trust through his commitment to truth. No Morris fan should miss it.

(Or the Man Who Denied Reality)

The Ashtray

The ashtray (or the man who denied reality)

Philip Gourevitch

Collects the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the controversial digital photographs from Abu Ghraib, in a collaborative account of Iraq's scandal-marked occupation that reveals how it is being experienced by both guards and prisoners. 100,000 first printing.

Standard Operating Procedure

اعتقاد به شاهد

The Ballad of Abu Ghraib

Una lúcida reflexión sobre la guerra de Iraq a partir de las humillantes fotos tomadas en la cárcel de Abu Ghraib.

La balada de Abu Grhaib

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and former private detective Errol Morris examines the nature of evidence and proof in the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case Early on the morning of February 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor, called the police for help. When the officers arrived at his home they found the bloody and battered bodies of MacDonald’s pregnant wife and two young daughters. The word “pig” was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime. So began one of the most notorious and mysterious murder cases of the twentieth century. Jeffrey MacDonald was finally convicted in 1979 and remains in prison today. Since then a number of bestselling books—including Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer—and a blockbuster television miniseries have told their versions of the MacDonald case and what it all means. Errol Morris has been investigating the MacDonald case for over twenty years. A Wilderness of Error is the culmination of his efforts. It is a shocking book, because it shows us that almost everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable, and crucial elements of the case against MacDonald simply are not true. It is a masterful reinvention of the true-crime thriller, a book that pierces the haze of myth surrounding these murders with the sort of brilliant light that can only be produced by years of dogged and careful investigation and hard, lucid thinking. By this book’s end, we know several things: that there are two very different narratives we can create about what happened at 544 Castle Drive, and that the one that led to the conviction and imprisonment for life of this man for butchering his wife and two young daughters is almost certainly wrong. Along the way Morris poses bracing questions about the nature of proof, criminal justice, and the media, showing us how MacDonald has been condemned, not only to prison, but to the stories that have been created around him. In this profoundly original meditation on truth and justice, Errol Morris reopens one of America’s most famous cases and forces us to confront the unimaginable. Morris has spent his career unsettling our complacent assumptions that we know what we’re looking at, that the stories we tell ourselves are true. This book is his finest and most important achievement to date.

Errol Morris: Interviews is an irreverent and humorous collection of conversations with the acclaimed filmmaker. Morris has created some of America's most innovative, lasting cinematic works. Generations of filmmakers, scholars, cinephiles, and fans turn again and again to such films as The Thin Blue Line; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control; Academy Award-winner The Fog of War; and Standard Operating Procedure. Throughout his career-which has included stints as a private eye, film programmer, and commercial director-Morris has honed a unique formal and technical cinematic approach. A Morris film is characterized by intense personal interviews; dramatic re-creations; a haunting, modernist musical atmosphere; and a keen sense of complexity, irony, and black humor. With each new film, Morris challenges and redefines what a documentary can be. This volume features startling interviews from throughout his career, as well as intimate, never-before-published discussions. Livia Bloom is a film curator and a contributor to the collection Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Her writing is published regularly in Cinema Scope.

Errol Morris

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