Gates of Heaven (1978)

Directed by Errol Morris.

Many of the most acclaimed documentaries deal with "important" issues: poverty, war, The Holocaust, even the death penalty (the subject of Morris' own THE THIN BLUE LINE). This film, which in my opinion is the best documentary I've ever seen, is ostensibly about pet cemeteries, but ultimately it's about the ways in which we deal with the death of those we love, and by extension with our own mortality. One of the chief pleasures of GATES OF HEAVEN is in the distinctive and colorful ways the various interviewees talk- from the resignation of failed cemetery owner Floyd McClure to the regurgitated management philosophies or Philip Harberts to (especially) ornery old Florence Rasmussen, each person interviewed for the film has an inimitable personal style which is impossible to write but key to the success of this film. As Morris interviews various owners of dead animals, they reflect on how important these pets were in their lives as a source of companionship and unconditional love- sure, these people sound a little crazy for projecting these feelings onto animals, but simply by presenting these people the film asks us how many people can offer the same kind of loyalty these pet owners felt from their pets? In the end, this film offers a great deal of food for thought, and no small amount of philosophy, as when one pet owner states, "there's your pet, your pet's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move?" No film I've seen is this profound about the ways in which people seek meaning not in art or centuries-old wisdom, but in the lives (and deaths) of others.