From Word To Word

A friend of mine graciously volunteered to take my eldest son to the library with her own kids this afternoon.  Since my youngest was still napping, I decided to watch Errol Morris’ Dr. Death:The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., the story of a self-taught maker of execution equipment who took samples from several of the Nazi concentration camps and testified that he could see no signs that gas was used at those facilities.

Though his report was hailed by holocaust deniers and reviled by virtually everyone else, Leuchter is not a stereotypical revisionist.  He gives the persistent impression that he still does not fully understand the magnitude of what is at stake in his findings, and he seems bewildered that people would object to his lack of experience, to his questionable sample collection methods, and to the insufficient information that was given to the lab that did the testing.  He seems half-aware of this naivete, trying to compensate for it by playing the part of the expert for the camera, a pose that makes him seem alternately pitiable and absurd.

The film as a whole has so much of Errol Morris about it that it hardly needs his name on the cover.  The editing is masterful throughout, as always, but I was particularly impressed by the use of a kind of blackout effect, where the shot of someone being interviewed momentarily goes blank while the voice continues to play over the black screen.  This technique produces an eerie sort of effect, as if the power has flickered for a moment, or as if the camera can no longer bear to look at its subject unblinkingly.  It serves as a distraction for the viewer, not away from what is being portrayed, but toward it, away from anything else.

Morris himself enters the film only once, where his offscreen voice asks Leuchter whether he has ever considered the possibility that he might be wrong.  Leuchter’s answer is less illuminating, I think, than Morris’s question.  It functions almost as the crisis of the film, as the question that necessarily haunts it from the beginning, and there is a tangible sense of catharsis when Morris finally verbalizes it in the only words that he will speak.  When Leuchter answers that he does not actually consider this possibility, not after he had reached his conclusion at the camps, it is almost irrellevent. No answer he could give would suffice in any case.  It is only necessary that the question should be asked.  This is why the film was made, and this why it should be seen.