Morris: Vernon, Florida (1981)

Vernon, Florida started life as Nub City, a documentary about a collection of Vernon residents who amputated themselves to collect insurance money throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, after reputedly receiving death threats from some of the subjects, Errol Morris opted for a more general portrait of the town, making for one of the most restrained, refined films of his career. For the most part, it consists of long, lyrical tone poems to Vernon and its environs, interpersed with quiet, contemplative monologues that perhaps feel more cryptic than they really are, just because the film presumes so little about how we should approach them, scruplously refraining from what one local preacher describes as “therefore experiences.” Even at this early stage in his career, it’s clear that Morris is able to utterly relax his subjects, engaging them in the most casual, candid way, until it’s feels like they’re talking to themselves, or thinking aloud, rather than addressing him or the camera. That allows them to retreat into their most mystical and apocalyptic mindsets, until it feels as if everyone in the town is preaching, testifying  or bearing witness to an interminable waiting that soaks into the pores and pauses of Morris’ montage sequences, making the film feel much longer than it actually is. Everything visionary about the American vernacular is distilled here, spoken in tongues touched with a strange grace, voices that are not their own. Morris may have gone to Vernon in search of eccentricity, but Vernon, Florida is too esoteric to be eccentric – it exceeds it, touching the very tip of what a documentary can do.