उपयोगकर्ता समीक्षाएं

Leuchter is an expert in execution technology (designer of electric chairs, gas chambers, etc.), whose career was wiped out when he got swept up in the Holocaust revisionism movement (he testified, as an expert witness in a defamation suit, that the Auschwitz crematoria could not and did not serve as gas chambers). In this vivid documentary, Morris lets Leuchter speak for himself (which reveals him to be a man of limited horizons with a - let's say - quirky moral code, likely undone by hubris rather than evil [although Morris may deliberately be making that as far as possible an eye-of-the-beholder issue]), while providing a blizzard of visual accompaniments that emphasize the lurid raw material of Leuchter's life (a strategy indicated by the B-movie undertone of the title), and flirt with his obvious sense of his own heroism. Leuchter has more than enough rope here to hang himself, and pretty much gets the job done. Morris doesn't try to explore the issue of Holocaust revisionism generally, pretty much taking our revulsion on faith: if anything, from my limited previous reading on the subject, that's doing Leuchter a favor. Anyway, revulsion or not, it's hard not to be fascinated by a man who can calmly chatter about his value-pricing approach to selling death machines (although custom made, he tells us, they're sold at "off the shelf" prices).

Leuchter is one amazing guy. This is a guy who became one of the US's foremost experts on death engineering - he designed and built/rebuilt several execution devices for death rows throughout the nation. Then, tragically, he took it upon himself to travel to Auschwitz and hammer bits off the gas chambers to bring home for cyanide testing. His conclusion: no-one was gassed there. Oops. Then he compounded his mistake by testifying for Ernst Zundel and speaking at holocaust-revisionist meets throughout the world.

So, an excellent subject for a movie, and Morris does an okay job. There are a few faults. The quality of some of the interview footage is quite poor. And there is the question of the reconstructions. Leuchter provided Morris with plenty of "home movies" which are incorporated into the film, so the function of the reconstructions seems merely to be to reinforce in our minds the dramatic qualities of a lot of the actions Leuchter performed. Personally, I could've done without them.

10/10 for the subject, 6/10 for the film-making, gives 8/10 overall.

Errol Morris takes us on a ride detailing the fascinating story of Fred A. Leuchter. In so doing, he shows us what happens when the impertinent ideologue meets the power of political zealotry. The perception of Leuchter takes on many forms. On one hand, he is the very personification of the American dream by being a man who rose above his limited education and made a niche for himself in the business of execution. He is also the classic American idealist. A man who values the principles of the Constitution above all, even when defending them come at the expense of reputation and financial security. However, Leuchter is also termed an anti-Semitic death monger, and the very personification of immorality. Turgescence aside, in my view Leuchter falls somewhere in the middle.

Leuchter's take on the Constitutional tenants of cruel and unusual punishment are clear. He believes the state has the right to execute, yet not to "torture" the executed. A modern day Joseph Ignace Guillotin, Leuchter saw his role as providing a humane death for the condemned. By his own admission, Leuchter explained that his reputation as an "expert" on the varieties of killing machines, was formed in the absence of competition. Thus, Leuchter defined competency as being willing to do the research and solve the problem. This particular expression of his Constitutional piety found him opposed only by the anti-capital punishment lobby, a frame of reference that would prove inadequate once he agreed to help Ernst Zündel.

It is here that Morris and the film break down. While Morris competently sets the stage of how Leuchter could be become involved in the Zündel defense, what isn't clarified is Leuchter's take on his own methodology and the subsequent analysis done by the lab to which the rock samples were sent to. All the testimonials that deify and demonize him are the predicable protestations of political zealots. However, the moral linchpin of the entire Fred A. Leuchter story is the degree to which Leuchter felt he lived up to his stated definition of competence, and his behavior following the socio-political uproar. Instead, Morris leaves us with a multitude of hyperbolical expressions that provide little depth to the issue. Morris's cinematic quirks of angled shots, changeable film stocks, and Tesla coil effects are not enough to mask this ultimate failure. In all, an interesting yet unsatisfying effort at bringing a more comprehensive view to the story of Mr. Death.

I have never seen a movie handle moral ambiguity quite like this before. It's ambiguous on so many levels. FL Jr. worries about the humanity of the methods of execution, and it never occurs to him that the act itself is inhumane. The obvious hatred in the face of Shelly Shapiro (leader of a Holocaust remembrance group) makes you wince at the moral ambiguity of her acts. And finally that this mouse of a man is neither Jesus nor Hitler (two comparisons made in the film) is the only firm footing you are left with. Not earth-shattering, but what a film!

This documentary presents the story of the rise and fall of Fred Leuchter, an apparently self-taught engineer specializing in the repair and fabrication of instruments of capital punishment. His choice to develop evidence to deny the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, Poland causes a descent into villainy and subsequent ostracism from his clients and his wife.

Several of Leuchter's detractors are interviewed in the film and vilify him as an anti-Semite and a perpetrator of a cruel hoax. His supporters portray him as the second coming of Christ and a man worthy of equal footing with George Washington. If Leuchter actually was aware of his place in the events that led to his downfall, then one could assume he falls somewhere between the two extremes. But this film amply demonstrates that in many ways, Fred in a class by himself.

This little man from Massachusetts grew up around the prison where his father worked, and he saw the daily life of both inmates and guards. He came to see both groups as his friends, and later in his life he chose to research ways to make execution equipment safer and more humane, not only for the inmates being executed, but also for the guards that have to deal with the psychologically disturbing business of execution.

Over time, he became prominent in his field, and was recognized as perhaps the only expert in the United States on repairing and building execution devices. It was this expertise that drew the attention of holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who was on trial in Canada for publishing a document entitled "Did Six Million Really Die?", which the government of Canada argued was published with deliberate lies about Nazi execution of Jews. Leuchter was approached as an expert on execution and was asked to journey to Auschwitz to develop evidence to disprove that the crematories at that most infamous of concentration camps was used as execution chambers.

It is here that the mystery of Fred Leuchter begins. In the film, a holocaust denier relates a conversation he had with Leuchter in which he had asked Fred about his illegal and highly distasteful excavations at Auschwitz. Leuchter replied, "It wasn't what I found, but what I didn't find that blew me away." It is this statement that rings in my head when I try to examine Fred Leuchter's actions. Why didn't he think about what was being asked of him? Why didn't he see this inquiry in the larger scale of the history of the Second World War, and indeed in the history of civilization? Since he was so deliberate and so thoughtful in his research in to execution equipment, why did he not research the subject of the gas chambers at Auschwitz more thoroughly? Journalist Van Pelt explains that all he had to do was examine the archives at the camp to discover a wealth of information that the Nazis put together about the subject of the "gassing basements". Leuchter obviously understood nothing about the subject of chemistry (an absolutely necessary discipline to begin addressing the presence of cyanide on the bricks of the camp), and yet he took the job of disproving the existence of gas chambers. Why?

This is the area where Errol Morris' skill as a documentarian really shines. He shows Fred lurching around at various white supremacist meetings to discuss the findings of his report, apparently unaware of agenda he was sent to justify. As a thoughtful and deliberate man, he came to the conclusion that the chambers at Auschwitz could not have been used as execution chambers, but obviously uses his own narrow view point to reach that conclusion, since (in his opinion) if he had designed such a device for mass execution he would not have built it that way. He doesn't understand that he was pushed to present a certain result, and that the individuals that wanted justification for their viewpoints were not to be trusted. Morris lets us see all the swirling action around Leuchter, and demonstrates that Leuchter himself was unable or unwilling to see his place in the madness surrounding the trial, as well as demonstrating that Fred couldn't fully understand why state governments were suddenly unwilling to deal with him, killing his business as an execution engineer.

Leuchter's detractors took pains to ruin his life which, in a country that thrives on free speech and the open expression of ideas, is as shameful an act as Leuchter's own foolish holocaust denial. But an interviewee stated eloquently in the film that Fred had the chance to retract his statements. Fred at any time could have limited his involvement with the project. He should have conducted his investigation in the full light of day rather than slinking around a vitally important historical site, chopping up pieces of what many consider a holy shine to the lives of those callously murdered there. He could have done many things that any rational and considerate person should have done.

But he didn't.

Morris' film is one of the best examinations of a person's life committed to film. Highly recommended.

In Errol Morris's film, "Mr. Death", Fred Leuchter Jr. comes across as a passionless, mechanical robot, fitting the engineering profession that he devoted his life to. Leuchter, the innovator of many death penalty devices and subsequently the only scientist willing to testify favorably in a celebrated Canadian trial that questioned the existence of the Holocaust, is either a hero to some or a villain to many. Morris, except for a Frankenstein-inspired opening and closing set in the film, prefers to let Leuchter be Leuchter rather than adding more contempt to a decidedly pitiful figure. The one time Morris does appear to interfere is when he asked Leuchter point blank if he could have been mistaken in any of his analysis. There are also camera tricks which render what Leuchter did as malicious, such as the split screen between what was Auschwitz and now, the slow-motion as Leuchter is chipping away at sites many Jews consider holy ground, and the phasing in and out of color and black and white film as we see Leuchter demonstrate his electric chair. The motivation behind what he did lies at the heart of "Mr. Death". He aspired to perfect the most humane killing machine because he said he believed in capital punishment, not capital torture. He cared that prison guards who knew the death-row inmates well would not have to suffer cleaning up the morbid residuals of those electrocuted. Yet he tried to carry this same mind-set in understanding the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In his mechanical mind, he asked how he could have done a better job of extermination. "Mr. Death" is an unpleasant but needed lesson about the mosaic people who live and work with each of us everyday - a people who seem anti-social yet amoral and who seem to be guided by that inner light that we can barely know or understand.

This is a documentary that feels like a compressed news broadcast. Errol Morris, the reason why Werner Herzog ate his shoe, makes this documentary about, well, the rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., also known as Mr. Death. During the 70's and 80's, Mr. Leuchter found himself in a successful niche improving upon and creating new machines to implement capital punishment. Though he was not a licensed technician, he sold blueprints and homemade machines to state penitentiaries as well as acted as a consultant on the lethal machines in prisons across the country. Where Mr. Leuchter went awry was when he was contacted to investigate the truthfulness to the claim that Nazis used lethal gas to exterminate thousands of people at concentration camps in Germany and Poland. His research found him knee deep in the ruins of Auschwitz, taking rock samples off the walls of gas chamber rooms to take back to the United States for arsenic analysis. His research turned up no traces of cyanide in the wall samples nor evidence of the structural integrity of the supposed gas chambers to safely contain the gases. He presented his findings to the trial of Ernst Zundel, a holocaust denier on trial in Canada for publishing documents refuting the Holocaust ever occurred, and was successively outcast from society as a fellow Holocaust denier. Through Morris' ninety minute film, we are shown the relative success of a man quickly sink to the bottom of the world's hating order through the publication of one research project. Mr. Leuchter is portrayed as objectively as possible in this film, sometimes even going to black while his voice continues, but the sheer tenacity of this man makes me grit my teeth with rage when I think of him. His lack of concern for human life and the sufferings of others and his ambivalence towards people as both models of death and financial gain is a horrifying example of what kinds of people do what kinds of things in this world. The movie was well made with nice interludes of beautifully shot slow motion 35mm as well as video footage from trials, video from Leuchter's own research in the tombs of Auschwitz, and the interviews of Leuchter sitting and talking about his work as calmly as a dove coos.

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the subject of this documentary, is a lonely man, and so a man of narrow acumen, because he's just appreciative to be liked, even by Nazi sympathizers. Errol Morris conjoins montages and music into a movie that is more reflection than subjective report. Fred Leuchter, the son of a prison warden, relatively floundered into the Death Row business. An engineer by training, he was inspired by the urge for more competent and compassionate execution apparatuses. He'd seen electric chairs that fried their sufferers without killing them, poison gas chambers that endangered the witnesses, gallows not efficiently constructed to break the neck. He went to work fashioning better versions of these devices, and soon prisons throughout the US were taking his council.

Notwithstanding his advance in trade, he was not, we understand, particularly well-received socially, though he does come to marry a waitress he meets owing to his habit of more than forty cups of coffee a day. We hear her offscreen voice as she balks at Fred's belief that their trip to Auschwitz was their honeymoon, where she had to wait in a freezing car, looking out for guards. Leuchter's visit to Auschwitz was the crossroads in his work. He was asked by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier to provide a professional opinion at his trial. Zundel financed Leuchter's 1988 trip, where he chiseled off chunks of brick and mortar in buildings used as gas chambers and had them examined for leftover cyanide. He resolves that the chambers never had capacity for gas.

There is a fault in his report, needless to say. The lab technician who analyzed the samples for him protests that cyanide would sink into bricks but to the measure of one-tenth of a hair. By chiseling large bits, Leuchter had eroded his sampling by several thousand times, not even taking into account the ravages of half a century. To find cyanide would have been supernatural. No bother. Leuchter became a darling after-dinner mouthpiece in the neo-Nazi circle, and the camera captures how his face illuminates and his whole body appears to embrace their cheers and ovations, how thrilled he is to shake hands with his new friends. Other people might recoil from the derelict position of a Holocaust denier, to say the least. An executioner is a derelict anyway and finds his friends where he can.

No filmmaker can be accountable for those reluctant or unfit to take in his or her film with a discerning view. Anyone who leaves this deeply unsettling film concurring with Leuchter lays claim with him on the verge of psychosis. What's unsettling about the film is the way Leuchter is fairly honorable up till the point at which the neo-Nazis sink their talons into him. Those who are revolted by ethnic cleansing and other forms of government-sponsored genocide sometimes have no pangs when the state executes them one by one, testing them on elephants as is appallingly shown early in this film through dog-eared stock footage. One can even be a two-term president after governing the most restless American Death Row on record.

In cinema, the Holocaust intensifies melodrama in that the conquest of the soul never struck so victorious against atrocity, because the atrocity is so confounding. Morris's haunting documentary tries to do something distinct. It's to attempt to penetrate the thought process of denial. You meditate on the general concept of denial, not as some postwar sensation but as something that was intrinsic in the undertaking itself. Those people did those things. The mystery is how. It's about deciphering why Fred Leuchter holds these beliefs.

There is paradox in of so many U.S. states heaping tax money on this guy's work, just to oust him because of his distasteful affiliations. The capability of so many people to live contentedly with the notion of capital punishment may be a hint to how so many Europeans could live with the Holocaust: When you swallow the idea that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to decide what is a cardinal wrongdoing, you're nearly there. Mr. Death offers no complacent position of judgment. He doesn't make it obvious for us with light ethical categorizations, because people are formidably paradoxical and can get their minds around fearsomely peculiar notions.

MR DEATH is one of my favourite types of documentary: those that tell a story you're completely unfamiliar with, but which turn out to be extremely compelling and indeed gripping thanks to the stuff being presented. In many ways, this is a simple story of one man's fame and later infamy, although director Morris uses it as a springboard to embrace some wider concepts, such as capital punishment and the Holocaust.

One of the important things that I took away from this was that Leuchter is no villain: just a misguided man who didn't necessarily deserve all the hatred aimed at him. Yes, he made a grievous mistake, but to destroy his life as a result of that error? "Let he who is without sin...", etc. The political side of the documentary is especially interesting as a result.

This is the story about how the world's foremost authority on gas chambers and all methods of executions proved that the Nazi "gas chambers" could have never operated the way historians claim. It completely destroyed his life, proving that Jews control the world. I assume Errol Morris wasn't intending on letting his feelings be known but it seems like he tries hard to make Leuchter look like a bad man and he consistently fails. It's really strange that he would make dramatic recreations of stuff that happened. That has no place in a documentary. The most interesting thing about the movie is that everyone who tries to discredit or insult Leuchter has absolutely no facts or real argument. They can only say things like he "desecrated a holy land" or "wasn't qualified". After the Jewish man who did the tests on the concrete samples and then testified that his results and report were 100% accurate and true, found out what the trial was about, he quickly says that he performed the wrong tests. The only argument anyone can muster is "you have to be crazy to say this". They claim Leuchter just wanted the spotlight but it's very clear that's not true. He was dragged into a court case and provided expert testimony, without bias. The only accurate statement his detractors made is that he came from nowhere and returned to nowhere. It's not only true, it's all he wanted and it doesn't even matter. This movie proves he is right.

I saw a rough cut of this documentary last year presented by Errol Morris. At this point, I had never seen an Errol Morris documentary, but I have to say I loved it. It's the story of the man who reinvented the modern electric chair and other devices to carry out capital punishment.

The first half of the film is darkly funny. The juxtaposition of images with Leuchter's descriptions makes for hilarious irony. The shots are in and of themselves wholly serious, but Leuchter himself is very comedic (whether he knows it or not).

The second half of the film evokes anger more than humor. Leuchter becomes an advocate for Holocaust denial through his scientific (?) research for a Canadian Neo-Nazi. The cut that I saw didn't have an explanation as to why Leuchter got the results that he did until a little later in the film. I though Errol Morris should have had this description as soon as the results of the tests were determined. Maybe he changed it, and maybe he didn't.

At the film's heart is, like a Greek tragedy, the story of a man whose rise to prominence is cut short by his hybris - his inability to accept that he could be wrong. As a result, a man who was once in demand by state after state is left to rot in his own misery and mistake.

The proliferation of cable television channels in the United States has dramatically increased the number of documentaries available for viewing. Just about any subject conceivable has been addressed, stocking the libraries of the History Channel, A&E, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, et al. Since this stuff is virtually free, you'd think it would be the death knell of theatrically released documentaries.

" Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr." was actually released to theaters, about thirty or so of them, and apparently did poorly. But it is an interesting movie, the biography of a self-taught execution device designer turned Holocaust denier. It's a little unsettling, not so much from Mr. Leuchter's career choices, but how Mr. Leuchter was so easily seduced to the white supremacy cause. And this important topic is not addressed in sufficient detail in the film. To much time is spent on the details of Mr. Leuchter?s personal life, family, career, and his studies that repudiated the existence of gas chambers. It misses the opportunity to explore why people will throw everything away to embrace causes such as white supremacy, when you would think they should know better. The movie is very well made and informative, but missed this golden opportunity.

He seems to be concocted by a joint effort between Flannery O'Connor and Philip Roth: Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. builds more humane death technology. He brings electric chairs into the twentieth century and suggests that TV sets be brought into the killing room for the victims of lethal injection. For a while, the director Errol Morris is fascinated by the visual properties of geeky, big-gummed, brown-suited Fred, who reveals his churning interior self in only one way: he confesses to consuming forty cups of coffee and six packs of cigarettes a day. He seems like the obsessive, narrowly niche-defined folk of Morris' FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL--AI geeks and topiary gardeners. Then history intervenes.

A Holocaust denier on trial for libel in Canada calls Fred as his star witness, proclaiming this mix of Babbitt and Kevorkian as a world-class expert. And so Fred takes his bride (the waitress who served him his daily forty cups) on a honeymoon to Auschwitz, where, in an almost comic act of desecration, he hacks chunks of brick from the deathhouse walls to prove they contain no Zyklon B. After pride cometh a fall, and Fred is ruined--and in the process Morris has minted a meditation on the roots of evil that joins together "Twin Peaks" and Sophocles.

The most tightly focussed and probably the best of Morris' documentary features, MR. DEATH is probably the most eloquent spokesman of Morris' continuing theme--the metaphysical delusions ordinary mortals use to get through their very mortal days and nights.

This is a movie in which the protagonist appears to be little more than an eccentric and (at first) "humane" engineer of killing machines. By the end of the movie they are seen as much less - or much more. This is the story of a person who's aspiration for recognition get the better of them and the costs of those aspirations. Morris demonstrates better than in almost any of his other documentaries why he is a master of this form. Mr. Leuchter takes an abundance of rope with which to hang himself and insists he 'did the right thing'; though it seems amply obvious to almost anybody watching this fascinating movie that he had no business involving himself in the "project" in the first place. He had no idea that the stakes he was playing for were so large and his failure to accept his limited knowledge effectively ruins what was for him, a very lucrative hobby. Maybe a better name for this remarkable documentary would be *Hubris*, since Mr. Leuchter lacks it in spades...

Never a director to focus on anything but the utterly fascinating, Errol Morris' documentaries over the past few years lay a foundation for a consistently excellent body of work. His love of the eccentric and the condemned prove fascinating viewing, but what makes his films so utterly gripping is his objectivity. Don't get me wrong, it's more often than not very clear as to where Morris' opinions lie, but he allows his subject a fair crack, a chance to give their side of the story, no matter how outrageous it happens to be. Here, with Mr. Death, about the highs and lows of Fred Leuchter, expert manufacturer of execution devices and Holocaust denier, Morris lets his subject seal his own fate with his own words.

With his father a prison warden, Fred Leuchter spent a lot of his youth around criminals, many of whom were facing imminent execution. Having heard about the flaws in the execution facilities - many of which were built by non-professionals with only a photograph to work from - Leuchter took it upon himself to design an electric chair that was not only more reliable, but more 'humane', both for the prisoner and the wardens. Soon enough, without any engineering qualifications, Leuchter was being employed by other states to design gallows and machines to administer lethal injection. Meanwhile in Canada, renowned neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel published a paper that denied the existence of the Holocaust. Leuchter was brought in as an 'expert' to investigate the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only to discover no trace of cyanide. This led to Leuchter's paper The Leuchter Report, and the downfall of the man's life and reputation.

Similar to Morris' The Fog of War (2003), which allowed former Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara to be viewed as a human being and not the monster it was so easy to label him as, Leuchter does not come across as an anti-Semite, or even someone that believes half the things he says. This mouse of a man - short, ugly, addicted to coffee and cigarettes - is entirely non-threatening. But as we witness him getting swept up in the neo-Nazi rallies he's invited to speak at, he comes across as a man that simply has a need to feel a purpose and place in the world. What he did is unspeakable - illegally gathering samples by chipping off stone from the walls of a place many hold sacred, to use his self-labelled expertise to deny the most shocking genocide in history - but it is nevertheless hard not to feel some sort of pity for him.

Being a former detective, Morris doesn't need to try very hard to disprove Leuchter's findings, and rubbishes with them with a few swift strokes. But those of us with working brains in our heads don't need to be told the Holocaust was real, so Morris doesn't spend too much time on it. This is very much about the man behind the uproar, using archive footage of his time at Auschwitz to portray a man that doesn't seem to grasp the true gravity of the situation. Why did he do it? Can he comprehend the possible repercussions of the words that come out of his mouth? Whatever the answers, this is a fantastic documentary - gripping, shocking, informative and objective, everything you would expect from Errol Morris.

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Despite your political views on the topics of capital punishment and/or The Holocaust, this film is an interesting expose' into ONE man's intellectual, emotional and spiritual drives. An allusion to his upbringing and guidances was particularly fascinating, to me. One of the truest of documentaries I've seen. Thankfully, the filmmakers avoided dramatizing or projecting, to any great degree. It was, perhaps a bit conclusive. However, the film did not insult my intelligence. It left some things to the imagination, which I appreciate. It has led me to further study of the man, and the topics presented. It was also quite visually appealing. What more can you ask?

Apparently Leuchter was the main expert on gas chambers in the USA, who spent his entire life constructing gas chambers, but was an incompetent clown when he was asked to give an opinion about someone else's gas chamber. To this day no one, including the producers of this film, has provided an explanation for their dismissal of Leuchter's conclusions.

Errol Morris has certainly 'injected' (pardon my contextural

pun) a bit of energy into the documentary form, even if the

films he makes lie somewhere outside its confines. Mr Death,

with its characteristic visual flourishes and tangents, is no

exception to this, though it does contain excerpts of a 'true'

documentary of Leuchter pilfering 'evidence' from Auschwitz.

Morris' film refutes Leuchter's findings to the point that the

only viewer who would give tham any credence would have to be as

biased as Ernst Zündel, the revisionist publisher whom

Leuchter's testimony defended. One detail of the film sticks out

in my mind... the home movies of young Leuchter accompanying his

father to work at the local prison, where he pals around with

the convicts, and explains how he learned at this tender age to

pick locks, pockets and safes... and with audible smugness

relates that these skills have actually aided him later in life.

The image of this boy nebbish, undoubtedly an outcast and loner

at school and socially, gaining acceptance amongst the convicts

helps to explain why such an intelligent and resourceful person

could be duped by the likes of the pinheaded, hateful Neo-Nazi

Revisionists. Here's a group of 'bad guys' accepting, applauding, listening and agreeing to Leuchter. Of course this

is because his undeniably faulted research supports their own

misguided conclusions. But it mirrors his experiences as a boy

among the convicts and provides a strong psychological

foundation for Leuchter's downfall into his delusional world. I'd recommend this film to anyone who enjoys thought-provoking

cinema, realizing that they are sadly in a minority amongst

filmgoers.

A film that can elicit pity for an execution equipment engineer and holocaust denier is doing more than just making us laugh; it makes us rethink the irredeemable. It is no revelation that a man's motives for endorsing a truly wacky opinion might stem from a need to be loved rather than a need to hate but this documentary manages something quite tricky--it prepares us to forgive. The film itself is truly lovely to behold from the opening credits to the delicate juxtaposition of now & then shots of Auschwitz. Go see this film.

"Mr. Death" is probably Morris' best work besides "The Thin Blue Line." Fred Leuchter holds your interest much longer than the gardener and the lion tamer from "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control," and his actions are far more consequential and film-worthy than those of the characters in "Gates of Heaven" and "Vernon, Florida." Fred Leuchter at times seems aware that he is not qualified to be in his position and that he has consciously chosen to stick to his beliefs whether they're right or not.

"Mr. Death" only had two drawbacks for me. The strobe-like effect in the opening credits bothered my eyes, and the chiseling footage in the death camps could have easily been edited down.

Film has had an immense impact on how we view and relate to the world. All film brings into question the nature of reality. The documentary film form is one of my favorites. Errol Morris makes great documentaries. Errol Morris' Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. highlights questions of epistemology.

Is film real? Are documentaries real? Why would we believe any film? Any documentary? Any Errol Morris documentary? Why would anyone believe Fred Leuchter concerning death apparatus? Why would anyone believe Fred Leuchter concerning the Holocaust?

When we enter our home for the night, flip the light switch and the light goes on do I question the reality electricity, of physics? Am I arguing with myself here? (A result viewing an Errol Morris film) Why did our American Icon, Thomas Alva Edison find it necessary to electrocute an elephant?