Errol MorrisBesprekingen

Very detailed and exhaustive. I found this quite interesting and stuck with it through to the end. Admittedly, it is not as well structured as some other true crime out there but it does what is most important; it conveys the complexity of the case against Jeffrey McDonald and his innocence claim.

Morris builds a very good book on knowledge, its mysteries and distortions. His approach is really compelling, sometimes even obsessive. The best part of the book is the first one, based o the story of the two famous pictures taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean war (and previously discussed by Susan Sontag). The following chapters use the same discovery pattern and get progressively less effective.

A close but informal look at photography, journalism, history, propaganda, and truth using a half-dozen or so examples. Very educational and thought-provoking. As the jacket copy says "part detective story, part philosophical meditation."

A cinematic portrait of the life and career of the infamous American execution device designer and holocaust denier. (fonte: imdb)

5 estante frente

Wheelchair bound Oxford physicist takes on a journey through the cosmos of time, from big bang to black holes. Classic text for the science library.

A terrifying, methodical, and thoroughly convincing case for the defense. Morris is deft and relentless in what will certainly be a new classic in true crime. Required reading for all fans of [b:In Cold Blood|9920|In Cold Blood|Truman Capote|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388208531s/9920.jpg|1940709], the podcast Serial (Season 1), The Jinx, The Making of a Murderer, or Morris' classic film The Thin Blue Line.

Morris's book is pretty easily explained by the title: we see things because we want to believe them. He explores this concept through a few different case studies: Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" photographs from the Crimean War, Sabrina Harman's photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, Dust Bowl photojournalism from the 1930s, combat zone photography from Palestine, and the case of Amos Humiston's Civil War photographs. The book is okay, but it is not 300-pages okay. Morris has some insights, but they are often buried in minutiae; his processes of uncovering the truth behind Fenton, for example, goes through more tedious detail than is needed to arrive at his point that every photograph is posed.

This is, of course, a point John Berger made on (I believe) the third page of Ways of Seeing back in the 1970s. Morris writes like someone who believes himself charting new territory, even though he must know better, as he cites people like Susan Sontag and talks to a lot of experts in photography. (It's these conversation that pad out the book.) The story of Fenton, an injustly-maligned man, is the book's best part, but it didn't need to be seventy pages to make its point. The chapter on Sabrina Harman, on the other hand, is pithy and focused and interesting. This book could have been a couple focused essays (and I think it was at some point? I believe these all started as New York Times columns), but instead they're stretched out in order to yield mostly banal insights. It feels mean to say it, but I suspect the book is best used as a source of anecdotes, rather than something you should actually read yourself. I'll happily tell you the Roger Fenton story in about five minutes myself.

This book is great, and I have a hard time rating it. While on the one hand it makes you think about these profound questions about photography, I also feel like it leaves much to be desired. There is just so much more to think about that he introduces. I wish he had attempted to give a cohesive idea or thought to it all. In the end is just feels like "isn't that a neat idea?" And my response is "YES! Now tell me more! Let's keep going!"

"What came first? The chicken or the egg?" Excellent movie, ridiculous opening line, but it does get the point across. A few years earlier Stephen Hawking wrote his most famous work "A Brief History of Time." This layman's book attempts to explain the origins and possible demise of the universe, and it does an excellent job. I enjoyed reading it so much I decided to buy the movie as well. Philip Glass' musical score is a pleasant distraction.½

Interessante ma non del tutto riuscito documentario scomodo su un personaggio scomodo.O meglio due personaggi scomodi.Da un lato Leuchter,mosso da intenzioni per certi versi"umane"(fare della pena capitale una morte indolore e dignitosa per il condannato)ma talmente privo di prospettive o dubbi morali(e ancora incapace dopo 11 anni di riconoscere il proprio errore)da suscitare poca simpatia o pietà(mostratagli invece dal regista).Dall'altro l'insulso neonazista Zundel,teorico dell'inesistenza di camere a gas nei campi di sterminio che nell'88 incaricò Leuchter di dimostrare la veridicità di questa teoria(cosa che ovviamente non avvenne,nonostante i riscontri positivi dell'ingegnere).

This is exactly the kind of thing I enjoy, and what I want most out of my true crime: a relentless chronicle of all the things we don't know, can't know, could have known but don't because somebody screwed up; an analysis of how a crime turns into a story turns into a trial, and how disconnected that can sometimes be from the truth. This case in particular is one where the truth hasn't seemed to matter much to a lot of people, but it's by far the only one. Morris does a respectable job of turning the documentary format into a book, and he's clear about what he does and what he doesn't think we can know about this case, and what could and should have been done differently, and who screwed it up beyond salvaging.

People talk about the pet cemetery business.

No commentary, no explanations, no hint at what Morris is thinking - just People. Although it consists of almost nothing but talk about pet cemeteries, that's not what it's about. Here's what Ebert's Great Movies essay has to say about one of the film's monologues: "William Faulkner or Mark Twain would have wept with joy to have created such words as fall from her mouth, as she tells the camera the story of her life. She paints the details in quick, vivid sketches and then contradicts every single thing she says."

Concept: D
Story: D
Characters: A
Dialog: A
Pacing: A
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: n/a
Acting: n/a
Music: B

Enjoyment: A

GPA: 2.9/4

Conflicting stories of an alleged abduction are told.

Meh. If you've seen the trailer, the movie doesn't have anything more to offer.

Concept: B
Story: C
Characters: C
Dialog: C
Pacing: B
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: C
Acting: n/a (arguably)
Music: B

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 2.3/4

Outstanding work from Errol Morris, digging through mountains of evidence to try and figure out what the hell really happened in this case. Morris' task is complicated throughout by missteps by the military police, prosecution, and even the defense—contaminating the crime scene, influencing witnesses, and even hiding evidence outright.

The psychological story presented by the prosecution (and McGinniss's Fatal Vision) should have been recognized as absurd from the start, and Morris does an especially good job of pointing out how such an accusation distorts every piece of evidence around it, reshaping it to support it. No motive or personality just goes to show how much of a calculated, manipulative killer at heart he was! Lack of guilt over the murders is no longer exculpatory, but only goes to show how much of a psychopath MacDonald was! This is all preposterous, and exactly the type of diagnosis designed to cover up the giant blank spots in the prosecution's case. (Also, Freddy Kassab comes off as far more predisposed to violence and mental illness; what's his alibi on the night of the killings?)

More troubling is the exclusion of evidence from both the trial and the defense's purview. a decision that is AT BEST willful ignorance, and more likely misconduct on the part of the prosecution. Some of the problem was simple incompetence from a department not really set up to handle complicated murder scenes—allowing dozens of people to trample all over the crime scene, and botching simple tasks like collecting fingerprints. Yet others were from a total lack of motivation in following-up other leads. (For example, lending so little credence to Helena Stokely's interrogation that the detective didn't even bother to take notes!)

But worst of all is the decisions during the trial to distort and withhold evidence so that it pointed to MacDonald's guilt. Pre-trial discovery for the defense was so limited as to be almost nominal, leading to their strategy to focus on MacDonald's personality simply because those were the facts they had access to! Lab notes and other working products were similarly withheld and distorted from the defense, discrepancies that came out years after the fact. And all of this is underpinned by a judge who undercut any attempt by the defense to present their case, throwing out psychiatric testimony and preventing evidence of Stokely's confessions from reaching the jury.

In sum, Morris presents an airtight case that MacDonald did NOT receive a fair trial (or preceding investigation) in any way, shape or form. More clouded is the question of his actual innocence, both by the shards of hard-to-reconcile evidence as well as the outright botching of the investigation. So much of what would be needed has been lost to time, but the evidence that remains—and that which Morris was able to gather—points to Stokely's confessions being accurate, even if we don't know the full story or other involved parties. Here is a woman who confessed repeatedly and to almost anyone who would hear her, regardless of consequences or anything to gain. And the worst part of all is that her testimony was contaminated (and nakedly discarded) by the media furor and probable threats from the prosecution.

While not as concrete as his documentary The Thin Blue Line, Morris is very convincing that MacDonald was screwed (and continues to be screwed) by the justice system. It's troubling to see the myriad Goodreads reviews concluding otherwise, rejecting Morris simply because it isn't a tidy and neat case. Real life is often more complicated than we'd like, and the simple story told by Fatal Vision—of a cold calculating killer who was eventually brought to justice by Freddy Kassab—is reductive, misleading, and most likely wrong.

I saw this referred to as "an epistomological crime story", which is a pretty accurate description. Film maker Errol Morris investigated the trial and conviction of Jeffrey MacDonald, a Greeen Beret accused of murdering his wife and children, and attempting to cover it up with a cockamamie story about crazed hippies. What Morris discovered was that the crime scene was ruined by incompetent investigators, evidence was ignored or destroyed, and a woman who repeatedly confessed to being part of the crime was never considered a suspect.
Can we ever know what happened? Morris waded through reams of court documents , and interviewed dozens of participants in the case to find answers. Whether or not you believe in MacDonald's innocence, it 's certain that he didn't get a fair trial. Morris holds particular scorn for Joe McGinnis, the author of "Fatal Vision", who gained MacDonalds' confidence then betrayed him by writing a factually bereft book imlpicating MacDonald's guilt.
How do we know what we know? How do we arrive at conclusions? Great book.
It's also a graphically interesting book. Every 4-5 pages is a black page with a clean white drawing of a piece of evidence from the case (hat, typewriter, rocking horse). It almost felt like watching an Errol Morris film.

That photography both reveals and conceals is not a new idea. Or that, as Morris comments, "concepts of naturalness, authenticity, and posing are all slippery slopes that when carefully examined become hopelessly vague." Or that, throughout the history of photography, photographers and others have grappled with the relationship of the photograph to reality. So, I experienced no "Aha" moments while reading Believing is Seeing . . . . Rather, of most interest to me were the details about the photographed historical moments that Morris centers his discussion around: The Crimean War, The Battle of Gettysburg, Abu Ghraib, the Great Depression & Israeli airstrikes in Tyre Lebanon on August 7, 2006. Of particular interest is the interview by the author with Ben Curtis, the AP photographer who took the what-became-exemplary photo of a Mickey Mouse doll in the ruins of Tyre. Curtis painstakingly explains the photo-journalist's working conditions, methods & ethics. Morris's own obsession with the photographs he fixates on here is so extreme as to feel oppressive. Understandable perhaps in that, as a documentary filmmaker himself, he has to continually question his own methods and motivations in the visual presentation of "facts" and "truth." In his quest to get to the bottom of the ambiguities and controversies surrounding the photos in question, he interacts with quite a few other men (always men, except for one female guide in the Crimea/ Ukraine) with congruent obsessions of their own.

"How do we know what we know?" illustrated and discussed over and over in a series of essays where the truth of photographs from Abu Ghraib in 2003, Sepastopol in the 1850's, the U.S. in the 1930's, Lebanon in 2007, and from Gettysburg in 1863 is discussed.

The subtitles of the sections:

Intentions of the photographer
Photographs reveal and conceal
Captioning, propaganda, and fraud
Photography and memory

Errol Morris is a documentary filmmaker, Oscar winner, and MacArthur award winner and a dogged investigator. He's written a thought-provoking and well-illustrated book. Just a tad repetitive.

This is the most amazing documentary I've ever seen. It's basically talking heads, with some visuals shown as McNamara talks over a Philip Glass score. Director Morris sits down with the 87-year-old Robert S. McNamara, who was the United States Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and one of those responsible for American involvement in the Vietnam War. He barely touches on that, the most controversial aspect of his career. It should have been boring--it was riveting. McNamara was still sharp--and inadvertently self-revealing.

While it doesn't convince that MacDonald is innocent, it is moderately more successful presenting a case for an unfair trial. I enjoyed the book; it was well-written and organized, lucid and researched. But it's conclusion, I believe, is wrong.

Pretty inconsequential book about mostly things that do not interest me. I did like the Walker Evans segment, or what had something to do with Walker Evans, but for the most part, a perfect bore.

I am from North Carolina. I’m quite familiar with the eastern part of the state, having lived there off and on for almost a quarter-century. Nothing surprised me more in this unusual book than learning there was apparently a thriving “hippie” scene in Fayetteville in 1970. It seems unimaginable from what I experienced, but the returning military from SE Asia, heroin, etc. dynamic was quite different from anything I remember. Anyway, while I was familiar with the broad outlines of the Jeffrey MacDonald case, I have never read any of the books about it (or seen the mini-series or any of the other documentaries) [. . .]

http://www.jgoodwin.net/?p=1000

First, I have to start by saying, what a beautiful book. The layout, design, text, cover, are all very well done. There was the occasional page that was printed crooked, or was smudged with transfer, but that may have been just a one off with my book.

I reacquainted myself with the Jeffrey MacDonald case by reading Fatal Vision, and followed up with this one. In a way I am glad I did, since there really was so much detail. Would I have understood this book as well if I hadn't had some basic knowledge, probably not. What that did was give me a clear idea about what was, in hindsight, so odd, about Fatal Vision. Joe McGinnis did not really do the best job going back to the beginning of the book to rewrite as his opinion of Jeffrey MacDonald changed. It almost seemed like he finished that book and forced it to go in the opposite direction it was originally headed in.

This book on the other hand, is a masterful work of scholarship. The information is comprehensive and organized in a way that really helps to see how this crime was every kind of complicated, and became a twisting mess of skullduggery by those intent on prosecuting Jeff MacDonald. It became an even bigger story for me when I could see how within the context of the murders, his life went from well-earned charm to possibly the cruelest kind of fate. And then to realize that he has been living this nightmare, not for the week or so it takes to read the book, but for the last 42 years. -KA

A terrific read. Besides the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, she sheer volume of material Errol Morris had to wade through is mind boggling. He tells a really great story. We know how it ends. Jeffrey MacDonald is still in prison after all. But this reads like a thriller. For fans of Morris, true crime, and great writing,