Errol Morris may be the most imaginative filmmaker in America, or even the world. As a nonfiction director, his curiosity runs deeper than it does for other filmmakers. He follows unexpected trails, and he doesn’t flinch when things get dicey. In The Unknown Known, his portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of our war in Iraq, Morris’s camera looks straight on as Rumsfeld casually mouths bizarre absurdities. For The Fog of War, a film about Robert McNamara, the architect of our war in Vietnam, Morris also looked straight on as a man he had loathed made one of the most startling self-examinations ever seen in public life.
Morris’s new film The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography takes a direction Morris doesn’t often travel. Elsa Dorfman is nice and relatively normal. She doesn’t do anything weird or wage stupid wars. She’s happily not afflicted by terrible disease, and hasn’t committed any major crimes that we know of. She seems kind and gracious; she has a good sense of humor. Errol Morris made this film about her because she’s a terrific photographer whose skill and knowledge are a national treasure.
Like most of Errol Morris’s films, The B-Side reveals itself slowly, although this time it’s rather casual. If you don’t know who she is at first she just seems like a slightly eccentric older woman with a classic Boston accent. Morris films her in her shop. She walks around, takes a phone call, but tells a friend that she has to get off because they’re filming. With a sweet canny look in her eye, Dorfman describes how she had a penchant for doing the kinds of things a nice Jewish girl in the 1950s wasn’t supposed to do, like have a career as an artist.
As she talks, the film shows her photographs – many of the great poets of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsburg. But she also shows portraits of other individual people, couples and families. Her eye is sharp and her comments on those images years after the fact are incisive and full of insight and humor.
The more Elsa Dorfman talks about her life, the more she reveals the extraordinary artist within her. She describes the kinds of paper she’s used and why; the kinds of cameras she’s used. She became famous not just for the people she photographed, but also for the format – she wound up working frequently with the rare large format Polaroid camera that produced photos 20 x 24 inches.
And then she got Polaroid to let her use its 80 x 40 camera, so that she could take photos exactly the size of her subjects. It’s thrilling to see these huge photos as they’re unrolled on a table by assistants with protective gloves. Dorfman has a special relationship with the poet Allen Ginsburg, who by the way loved to take off his clothes – and the life-sized images that juxtapose Ginsburg in tie and jacket with Ginsburg in the buff capture the rich ambiguity of the man. It’s also fascinating to see how artists adapt devices and materials other people never think of as tools for art. The near instant Polaroids were great for parties, in pre-digital times. But Elsa Dorfman saw the possibilities for a sense of immediacy in her photography, for a new understanding of time.
In recent years, Errol Morris’s films have been visually complicated projects, with rigid setups and archival footage. But for The B-Side, Morris has gone simple, direct and relaxed. It feels like being with Elsa Dorfman in her studio talking about her work. But do not be fooled, it’s as complex as any of Morris’s movies. It’s about the meaning of images, the fragility of the material world – what lasts and what doesn’t. It’s also about how precious art and artists can be, and how dearly we need them.
