Word: leuchter
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...Death," Errol Morris' new film, is subtitled "The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.," a formidable label that seems to imply a sort of melodrama that, while dramatic and intensely emotional, the work never really approaches. Instead, it is the disturbing, offbeat, and darkly comic story of Leuchter, a self-taught expert in execution equipment who travels to Auschwitz in order to prove that the holocaust never really occurred...
...while he does the same. This device is responsible for the way his subjects look directly into the camera, an innovation that gives lends his films a more personal quality. He needed a subject for a throwaway interview to test the machine before he began shooting the others, and Leuchter, who Morris always refers to as Fred, was that subject...
...need a graduate degree, just a smart idea. To do harm you don't need bad intentions, just a plodding arrogance. Those truisms are at the heart of the latest documentary enthraller from artful Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Short History of Time). Fred Leuchter won renown for devising more "humane" electric chairs, gallows and gas chambers. Now considered an expert in all aspects of state torture, Leuchter was hired by Ernst Zundel, a prominent denier of the Holocaust, to use his expertise to determine if the Nazi concentration camps had in fact been death camps. Leuchter went...
Morris, an elegant and scrupulous filmmaker, is fair both to Leuchter and his aggrieved accusers. The movie makes clear that Mr. Death's sin was not race hatred but hubris; he simply could not, does not, doubt his qualifications to do a job beyond his expertise. Morris takes this quietly agitated fellow (he consumes about 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes a day) at face value, letting Leuchter explain how tinkering with science led to his rise and fall. It's the fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution...