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Interview: Errol Morris on The B-Side, Elsa Dorfman, and Weirdness

Morris discusses his new film’s meditation on changing times, mediums, and identity.

Interview: Errol Morris on The B-Side, Elsa Dorfman, and Weirdness
Photo: Neon

Over the course of her career, the eccentric American portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman has photographed many prominent cultural figures, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andrea Dworkin, and Steven Tyler. But more often the subjects of her camera are neighbors, friends, dogs, even her own self. Her project is the immortalization of the everyday and her trademark is a large-format instant Polaroid, which every day inches closer toward going the way of the dodo. Now she and her work are the subject of Errol Morris’s The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, a meditation on changing times, mediums, and identity. Last year, following the film’s world-premiere screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker sat down to speak with me about Dorfman, her fixation with self-portraits, and what makes them kindred spirits.

How many projects are you on at the moment?

Probably four, five, six. Something like that.

Twitter proves that you’re a filmaholic. In August, you tweeted: “CAUTIONARY TALE. If you’re not careful, you too could find that you’re making a new film.

Well, maybe it is a disease?

Is it almost a physical urge?

Yes. Artists need to make art. That’s what they do. Like bees and honey.

Is this sort of artistic schizophrenia something you feel comfortable with?

Thinking about a lot of things at the same time helps me. It’s possible. It’s true. I’ve been writing books. I just finished one and I’m starting on another. So that’s going on too. And I’m still doing commercials.

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And there’s this section of your website called “weirdness.”

It’s self-explanatory. My dog, singing when I’m cello-playing. It’s pretty weird.

What’s it about weirdness that appeals to you?

I like stories which are unexpected, are strange. Maybe even perverse.

So everything this film is not. Do you remember what was the starting point for this particular film?

The beginning was my relationship with Elsa. I’ve known her for a long time, over 25 years. I thought about making this film ever since she started showing me photographs in her garage—a very simple film, with Elsa taking out her photographs and talking about them. Finally I got around to doing it.

Why now?

We’re in the middle of a massive project for Netflix and we took some time, and we shot it very quickly. In my frustration over not having finished a film in a while, I thought: “I’ll do this.”

How do you go from making a film about, say, humankind and time, and then go back to Elsa’s studio?

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The themes couldn’t be bigger than the ones in the film: time, memory, love, friendship. It’s not as though Elsa was secretary of defense and involved in a major world war, but the themes are big. Maybe in a smaller setting, but big.

There’s that fantastic moment in the film when Elsa says that, for her, taking self-portraits while working is a way of making her protagonists feel more comfortable with themselves. Is this something you can relate to?

I relate to her work on many levels. Part of her work is self-presentation, a kind of relationship between the people she photographs and her. They’re presenting themselves to her camera and it’s very much a collaboration. What I do is very much a collaboration too. So, yeah, we’re kindred spirits. But what Elsa, if my memory serves me correctly, is saying is that she took pictures of herself because, if she could take pictures of herself and accept herself, it would make it possible for her to take pictures of others. Her archive is filled with hundreds of pictures of herself and her family. And, of course, thousands of her friends and the people, you know, she’s met along the way. That’s different for me. I’ve never been into self-portraits, not something what I’ve done. But I love Elsa’s self-portraits. I think they’re fabulous.

Me too. Especially when she starts talking about time.

Yeah.

Do you think about how photographs are a way of preserving the stillness of time and, at the same time, proof that time is relentless in its passing?

I would say it’s about the relentless nature of time and its oddity in photography. Oliver Wendell Holmes called it in the 19th century the “mirror with a memory.” And that’s not exactly true. It becomes a memory, a way of reconnecting yourself with the past and with people. In many instances, as Elsa points out, ones that are no longer with us. It’s her strange relationship with the photographs of Allen Ginsberg.

Is this something that also happens to you? Does collecting all those moments with people make you also more aware of when they’re gone?

It’s inevitable. I mean, I think of The Thin Blue Line and the two major characters: Randall Adams, an innocent man, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, and David Harris, who was the actual killer. They’re both dead. They’re both gone. And what remains of them is really The Thin Blue Line, the movie and my memories of my relationship with them. Still photography is very different from motion picture photography. In my house there’s a table filled with photographs of people who died, my family.

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Under the glass counter?

No, it’s just a table with framed photographs. And photographs do have a strange way of bringing the dead to life. Cause there they are. And it’s always a product of that physical photograph and of memory. Your memory of these people. It’s a strange phenomenon.

Does it ever happen to you that your intuition doesn’t necessarily work out?

And the project does not come together? Rarely.

Lucky you.

Yeah. Usually they do come together, eventually. I mean, there’ve been troubles along the way. But something emerges in the end. Even in the case of making a film about Donald Rumsfeld, who’s certainly what I would’ve call a problematic character.

Seems so!

I like almost all the people I’ve ever put on film. Rumsfeld may be an exception. He was so difficult. He’s the kind of person you’re supposed to be able to relate to, because he’s avuncular, charming, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there’s something about him, for me, that seems so horribly fake and manipulative. A person you couldn’t really ever touch, who you could never see. And in the end it’s hard to relate to someone like that. He’s so complex. Or maybe not? He’s so concerned with his image that there’s really nothing left but image. So it’s like you’re looking at some kind of façade. You know, a hollow man. A bullshit artist.

Were you happy with how you told that story?

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It may be not the movie that I originally planned to make or the people would’ve liked for me to make. But it is a movie I rather like. You’re trying to capture something, particularly a movie about a real person. And part of the success is whether you’ve done a good job doing it. I think The B-Side does a good job of capturing what I love about Elsa.

Elsa’s style changes only slightly. Her trademark dresses are sort of another version of the same dress. But despite being little conservative in that department, she does have little eccentricities, like the objects she keeps near her. Do you also have things like that?

Yeah, I probably do. I have my own definition of art. It’s that you set up a series of arbitrary rules and then follow them slavishly. Elsa has a lot of that. People pay to come into her studio. She lights people more or less the same. They’re dressed informally. My favorite of her photographs usually involve very large ensembles of people with dogs or cats. She’s a really great animal photographer, among other things. And even with this simple premise, this constraint that she puts on it, a remarkable body of work has emerged. And maybe even more remarkable because of the constraints. It’s framed in a very specific kind of way. Call it style, I don’t know.

Because of her attachment to Polaroids, Elsa’s sort of been like a witness of a gone era. Is this an experience that you can in any way relate to with the transition from film to digital?

Film is different. And I’m not so wedded to one specific technology. Film obviously, well maybe not so obviously, has gone through a whole set of enormous changes in the last 30 years. Editing started off with double system, flatbeds, and, now…I don’t believe any of the people working for me in editing have ever handled film, it’s all about digital. Shooting is no longer on film and people have moved on. I mean, there have been losses, formats that I loved, like Super 8. It’s very hard to get Super 8 processed these days.

I wonder whether the experience of losing the tangibility, physicality of the medium, changed anything in the approach?

I’m sure it does, but I’m not sure what it is exactly. It’s certainly a lot easier to edit film than it was 20, 30 years ago. It’s a lot easier to work with multiple cameras. My Netflix series, Wormwood, was sometimes shot with 10 cameras on an interview. The B-Side was done with four. So, putting all of that together in the old days would’ve been a big deal. Now it’s pretty straightforward.

You’ve let go of your trademark Interrotron in The B-Side.

Yeah, and in these Netflix series I didn’t use it either. I’m still using it but not slavishly. It seems to me appropriate in some instances and not appropriate in others. Now, I like to think that I’m capable of doing other things. I don’t think the essence of my art is on that device. And I like making it clear.

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It does give you a sense of presence of sorts, I’d assume? Is this what makes the experience different?

It’s different because it creates a connection between two people and the possibility of eye contact. There’s something very strange about it, but it works. I mean, I never thought, when I first had the idea, this could possibly work. People aren’t going to want to do this. Cause you’re basically looking at each other’s live video images, looking at screens. Except they’re two-way mirrors. So that you’re both looking at each other’s live image, but essentially the effect is of people looking at each other, as if I’m looking at you right now. It’s strange. There’s nothing quite like it.

Is this something people find difficult?

No. I thought they would.

Many people don’t look at each other when they talk.

I think it makes it easier. I know it does. I’ve used it, you know, literally hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of times.

Do you ever feel sort of disappointed, when the project is over and you have to part ways with your characters?

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Yeah, sometimes. But I’ve been connected with a lot of people over the years that I filmed. I still see Stephen Hawking from time to time. McNamara is dead, but I saw him three years after the film was finished. And I hope Elsa’s gonna be with us for a while. She’s not disappearing.

Some of her observations are unlikely gems.

She has a way of actually coming up with metaphors. Her metaphysical metaphors are good as anything I’ve ever read or anything I’ve heard. You know, we have the cones and we have the ice cream, so why not put the ice cream on the cones? It’s fantastic.

When describing Polaroid’s history she basically explained the nature of disappearance.

You know, she’s great. She’s profound. Ridiculous and profound at the same time. I think that’s the best combination there is. For me, the highest.

Anna Tatarska

Anna Tatarska is a film and cultural journalist with a career spanning almost a decade. She lives in Warsaw, Poland.

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