I was less than impressed with the smear job done by some of the more dubious people in the Jewish community on him. All he did was do some tests he wasn't qualified to do. That stupid Shapiro woman did not impress me at all and came across rather sinister.
Whatever our personal opinions about Leuchter, I think it was necessary to show the outrage of the people on the opposite side of the argument if this film was to be effective at all. Errol Morris would have been remiss to show us only one slant, whether it was pro- or anti-Leuchter. I felt the movie was actually made quite well, as it humanized Leuchter rather than just demonizing him, and it let him speak for himself, so we can base our admiration or hatred for him on his own words and actions, rather than having him just be talked
about, if that makes any sense.
And it was balanced out by having "sinister" types speaking out on both sides as well - that Shapiro woman did her own argument no favours, and Ernst Zundel is a well-known bigot and fanatic (maybe better known in Canada, specifically Toronto, which is my hometown) - so there were definitely lousy spokespeople for each viewpoint present.
~ http://prettyh.blogspot.com/ ~
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rsmath-122-939496
12 years ago
When Morris originally screened an early version of the film for a Harvard film class, he found that the students reacted by either believing Leuchter's side of the story or by condemning the film as a piece of Holocaust denial. Morris had no such intention, however, as Morris had considered it obvious that Leuchter was wrong, and that the main idea of the film was intended to be the exploration of Leuchter as a being almost completely lacking in self-knowledge:
"The Holocaust has been used in movies as a way of increasing drama in a sense that the triumph of the human spirit never looked so triumphant against the horrors. This movie attempts to do something very different. It's to try to enter the mindset of denial. You are asked to reflect on the whole idea of denial in general, not as some postwar phenomenon but as something that was inherent in the enterprise itself. You would think it would be the easiest thing in the world to identify this behavior as wrong, horrific, depraved. Those people did these things. To me, the question is how. With Mr. Death, it’s about finding out why Fred Leuchter holds these views."[4]
Thus, the "fall" of Leuchter's life is portrayed not as a result of any particular ill feelings toward the Jewish people or passionate support for revisionist history, but rather as an absurd man bumbling into making politically incorrect statements. Errol Morris re-edited the film to include additional interviews with people who condemn Leuchter with varying intensity. Morris said this last part should have been unnecessary, since, to him, Leuchter was so obviously misguided in much of what he says in the film----yeah it's a copy and paste.
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