Morris: Gates of Heaven (1978)
Thursday, July 31, 2014 
Errol Morris’ first documentary focuses on the owners, operators and clients of a trailblazing pet cemetery in Los Altos, California. It’s easily one of his most eccentric subjects, and yet the film refrains from emphatic eccentricity more than any other in his career, with the possible exception of Vernon, Florida. Instead, Morris devotes his energies to making his subjects comfortable enough to retreat into their innermost thoughts, drift into reverie, until it’s more like they’re thinking aloud, allowing language to move through them, overhearing their deepest fears and desires with an almost Shakespearean simplicity and sublimity. In their mouths, it feels as if the American vernacular is always bearing witness, always testifying to a vision that remains beyond the consciousness of any one speaker, if only because it is so democratically distributed and dispersed. Insofar as that vision is concentrated in any way, it’s only through the emergent self-help industries that the owners and operators draw on to promote the business, to the point where the cemetery starts to feel like a harbinger of a new era of inspirational affect, a new iteration of American religious experience. And Morris’ “talking heads” signature emerges, fully-formed, as a point of access to that experience, or a way of allowing his subjects to access it, since the more they talk to the camera, the more they seem to enter their most mystical selves, their deepest, quietest places. In the process, documentary filmmaking is rarefied to the art of listening, as Morris’ soft, attentive textures render the whole film porous, turn his camera into an echo chamber in which each new voice simply adds its own cadence to the collective chorus. Perhaps that’s why there’s none of the luscious montage sequences that would become so prominent in his later documentaries – their connective tissue is all there already, internalised in every exquisitely composed interview backdrop, wrapped around his subjects with a hazy, Californian sheen, anchored in palettes unleashed by the Santa Clara sun. Over the rest of his career, Morris would return time and again to oddball, way-out visionaries, but Gates of Heaven is perhaps where he allows himself to become most entranced and intoxicated by their visions, hanging on their every word with hypnotic, muted rapture.
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Pyramids of Giza and the ancient Egyptians
Pyramids of Giza and the ancient Egyptians
The most famous Egyptian pyramids are those found at Giza, on the outskirts of
Cairo. Several of the Giza pyramids are counted among the largest structures ever built.[9] The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid. It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still in existence.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVgcBXiGvow