#10 - Vernon, Florida

I'm going to be going backwards through my top ten of all time, rewatching the films and giving a bit of detail about why I chose them. If you want to know what I've been watching lately I've added a movie diary list on the right hand side of the page. I hope to update it with all the films I see this year, but we'll see how well I stick to it.

I've set myself a hell of a task in describing Vernon, Florida, let alone explaining how a 55 minute collection of strange people in a small town talking into the camera is my favorite documentary of all time. Errol Morris wanted to make a documentary about Vernon because he got wind that people there were intentionally disfiguring themselves to collect insurance money. Unfortunately when he arrived he soon figured out that people aren't really comfortable recounting the details of how they defrauded insurance companies on film. Undeterred, he began to interview the locals and collected a group of strange interviews. The result is to me far more interesting than a documentary about insurance fraud. A turkey hunter tells us about his experiences on the hunt. A policeman tells the tale of how he was shot at one night. Three old men argue about the best way to shoot yourself with a shotgun. A couple shows off a mysterious jar of sand that they claim is expanding at an alarming rate. Faulkner couldn't make this stuff up.

Errol Morris is one of our most respected and acclaimed documentary filmmakers, and he is indisputably a master of the form. But an issue I have with him is the amount of control he imposes on his latest films. He always seems to find amazing stories, but he is obsessed currently with putting a subject in a room with his two-camera system [the interrotron] and having that person look you in the eye and tell you his/her story. And his most recent films are certainly powerful and entertaining, but I prefer the spontaneity of Vernon, Florida and his first film, Gates of Heaven. In Vernon we get to see these people in the context of the place where they live. There's a bit of the genius of Walker Evans' photography in this film. Evans realized that people will give you a great deal of information about themselves if you allow them to pose for a picture, and there's an element of that in the way we see these people 'performing' for the camera in the film.

There are also some lovely little contrasts in the film. My favorite consists of a pair of scenes where a man who is seemingly building his own church by hand tells a story of how God answers his prayers for very practical things, contrasted by the next scene where a pastor of a huge church gives a sermon about the amount of times Paul uses the word therefore in the book of Romans. It also has some absolutely gorgeous camerawork, capturing the strange beauty of a tiny town. The whole film seems like a beautiful, miraculous accident.

See also: My other favorite documentaries-- Anything else by Morris, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Last Waltz, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Burden of Dreams, The Five Obstructions, Grizzly Man, Don't Look Back, and No Direction Home.