Gates Of Heaven (1978)
Errol Morris' 1978 film about life and death at a Californian pet cemetery. Featuring interviews with pet owners, embalmers and the cemetery's management, it's a poignant, eccentric, deadpan documentary about the human need for company
When Errol Morris came to make this, his first documentary, he had limited practical experience of filmmaking. Indeed, when he put the idea to Werner Herzog, the legendary German director promised he'd eat his shoe should the project ever come to fruition. Proof that the man was as good as his word is to be found in the 1980 short film 'Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe'.
As with Morris' subsequent work, the unobtrusive approach generates revelations which are raw, resonant, candid, comic, and which take the film into areas only distantly related to the stated subject matter.
Pitching up at the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa Valley, California, Morris talks to the establishment's troubled proprietors, to embalmers, neighbours and grieving owners. Whether purposefully or inadvertently, his subjects' monologues are deeply revealing, both of themselves and the needs their pets fulfil. ("There's your dog," says one owner. "Your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something didn't it?")
Hovering in the background is the spectre of loneliness and disappointment. But Morris also has a dry sense of humour and a refined sense of irony. So refined, in fact, that some have wondered whether these folk are for real. They are, and though his subjects inhabit a very particular world, what they have to say is as memorable, moving and poignant as the most finely-crafted fiction.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
As with Morris' subsequent work, the unobtrusive approach generates revelations which are raw, resonant, candid, comic, and which take the film into areas only distantly related to the stated subject matter.
Pitching up at the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa Valley, California, Morris talks to the establishment's troubled proprietors, to embalmers, neighbours and grieving owners. Whether purposefully or inadvertently, his subjects' monologues are deeply revealing, both of themselves and the needs their pets fulfil. ("There's your dog," says one owner. "Your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something didn't it?")
Hovering in the background is the spectre of loneliness and disappointment. But Morris also has a dry sense of humour and a refined sense of irony. So refined, in fact, that some have wondered whether these folk are for real. They are, and though his subjects inhabit a very particular world, what they have to say is as memorable, moving and poignant as the most finely-crafted fiction.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
