Tension Between Formalism and Realism in "Mr. Death"

In our last class, Errol Morris' "Mr. Death" was screened, and during our discussion of the documentary form and its development in cinema, Prof. Streible invoked Andre Bazin when commenting on the human impulse to preserve life and avoid death (e.g. capturing life on celluloid). He specifically cited Bazin's "Ontology of the Photographic Image," which I then looked up.

In it, Bazin notes that, "The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making." He illustrates a difference between aesthetic expression (the formalistic tendencies a creator may have) and the psychology of resemblance (realism). Bazin also emphasizes the motion picture camera's ability to capture objectivity in time. Here, he chooses to distinguish the cinema in terms of a medium that negotiates realism through a sort of psychological manipulation of the viewer. Bazin illustrates the capacity of this type of manipulation to confer upon an image the effect of realism and to, in effect, codify a spectator's understanding of reality as it is offered through the visual medium of cinema.

In "Mr. Death," and in many of Morris' films, tension between formalism and realism is blatantly exposed, and in the process this tension is very revealing about the visual codes of realism spectators expect from documentary film.

Up to that point, I had only seen "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," a film that I primarily associate with man's various efforts to manipulate and/or control nature. In "Mr. Death," on the other hand, we have a subject who seeks to manipulate his own conception of history in such a way that Zoe Druick might describe as utilizing fiction to frame reality (in effect, exposing Leuchter's subjective fallibility). Morris' blatant manipulation of the image through such elements as slow motion and artful close-ups further compounds this theme by using reflexivity in documentary to reveal his own subjectivity in a medium so closely associated with objectivity and realism.

- Stefan Elnabli