Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War begins this week, though the 18-hour series is far from the first about the subject. Unlike Hollywood’s almost 15-year delay, documentary makers started trying to make sense of the war early on. The Vietnam War has been a cultural touchstone for generations, though it resonates most with…
Tag: Errol Morris
‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe:’ What More of a Title Do You Need?
Warner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) is a fun documentary short directed by Les Blank. In this short Herzog makes good on a promise that he made to Errol Morris to eat his shoe if Morris ever finished his film. Morris completed Gates of Heaven, and Herzog dined on shoe leather at its screening. In…
The Mind-Bending Twister of ‘The Unknown Known’
The Unknown Known represents Errol Morris’s attempts to understand the complexities of 81-year-old Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Gerald R. Ford. Despite the extended character portrait, however, the known still remains unknown at the end of this documentary. No one else could have created this portrait of such a…