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today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 August 1998 July 1998 January 27, 1999 Pictures added by this Website ENTERTAINMENT THE ENEMY WITHIN By ROD DREHER PARK CITY, Utah – Errol Morris , America’s most accomplished documentary filmmaker, has made his first Holocaust film.
It’s terrific – the kind of picture that keeps you awake at night – and it will surely become part of the Holocaust film canon. But it’s not going to win Morris any awards from the Anti-Defamation League , to say nothing of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.” crawls inside the mind of a mild-mannered Massachusetts fellow who has, almost inadvertently, become one of the leading lights of the Holocaust-denial movement.
The film, which is unfinished and without a distributor, is not interested in condemning Leuchter ; rather, it seeks to understand the creepy little man and tell us something deeply unsettling about his capacity for evil. The most chilling aspect of “Mr. Death” is the unshakable feeling that it’s about its audience as much as its subject. Morris became ill with the flu while at the Sundance Film Festival and canceled his interviews to fly home to Cambridge, Mass.
The director did participate in question-and-answer sessions following “Mr. Death” screenings, where he heard some complaints that the film didn’t take a hard enough line against Leuchter and the Holocaust deniers.
Reid Rosefelt , Morris’ longtime friend and publicist, said most people want the Holocaust dealt with in good-vs.-evil terms. “Meanwhile, you have Bosnia, and Pol Pot, on the news every night, and people making excuses for genocide, saying it’s time to put the past behind us and move on. We just accept that,” Rosefelt said. “Errol is much more interested in saying that Leuchter is us. That’s not a message people are willing to celebrate.”
Fred Leuchter (pronounced ” LOOSH-ter”) is a self-described engineer whose thorough averageness – his slight physical stature, genial conversational style and homely, jug-eared face taken from a Norman Rockwell portrait – belies his peculiar fascination with the mechanics of execution. He traces his macabre interest