Gates of Heaven

Dir: Errol Morris

1978

*****

Errol Morris's debut documentary film Gates of Heaven is now infamous and widely celebrated. It started Morris's fascination with eccentrics and helped him develop a certain style that, although influenced by his friend and would-be-mentor Werner Herzog, is very much his signature style. It's a style that has been imitated ever since, particularly on TV, but never as successfully, although Nick Bloomfield owes the film and Morris much thanks. The film is a series of talking-head interviews, each beautifully framed and static throughout. Morris is never heard asking questions and he lets the camera keep rolling as the interviewee keeps talking. Nothing is forced, instead he somehow gets more from the people he speaks to, purely by letting them say what they want. There is also nothing deliberate or malicious about his interviews, that is, he never takes advantage of them, when he most certainly could. The first half of the film centres on Floyd "Mac" McClure and his early development of a pet cemetery. Upset at his dog’s death (after accidentally hitting it with his truck) Mac was horrified that the only place to lay his pet to rest was a local rendering plant. Not knowing much about what a rendering plant does, Mac did some research and was horrified at what he found. Mac, being a deeply religious man, wanted to bury his dog as you would a human, and saw the rendering plant as a sort of hell for animals. He found a nice spot of land for his dog and then had the idea of starting a pet burial service for other like-minded animal lovers. Many people took up his offer but Mac did not have a head for business. Morris interviews Mac and interweaves interviews he had with the hip and bolshie head of the local rendering plant. We learn that because of various legal issues, all 450 animals that were eventually buried in Macs plot had to be dug up and moved to Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, which is run by John "Cal" Harberts and his two sons. The film then concentrates on Cal and his contrasting boys - one with a head for business, the other with aspirations of being a musician. There are some brilliant scenes, especially seeing Dan Harberts play loud guitar on the hill overlooking the animal graves. Some of the pet owners are wonderful to, never made fun of but a wonderful reminder of how people were back then. The film is probably most famous for a bet Morris had with Werner Herzog. In 1978, when the film premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary by Les Blank. Herzog had promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the project, to challenge and encourage Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. At the public shoe-eating, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition. Herzog cooked his shoes (the ones he claims to have been wearing when he made the bet) at the Berkeley, California restaurant Chez Panisse, with the help of chef Alice Waters. The shoes were boiled with garlic, herbs, and stock for 5 hours. He is later shown eating one of the shoes before an audience at the premiere of Gates of Heaven at the nearby UC Theater. He did not eat the sole of the shoe, however, explaining that one does not eat the bones of the chicken. It's a classic, up there with the best and most iconic and certainly most influential. I would choose Gates of Heaven over Grey Gardens every day of the week.