Errol Morris's Latest Subject Is 80 Years Old and Cooler Than You

With more than a dozen documentary features under his helm and at least a thousand commercials, Oscar-winning director Errol Morris requires little introduction. The same cannot be said of the ebullient octogenarian Elsa Dorfman, the subject of his latest film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, which sees release this Friday.

Dorfman has been taking photographs since the 1960s, when a secretarial stint at Grove Press introduced the self-proclaimed "nice Jewish girl" to a cavalcade of countercultural heavyweights—including Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, Anaïs Nin, and Bob Dylan, all of whom she captured on film. In Ginsberg specifically, Dorfman found both a muse and creative soulmate, and much of The B-Side pivots on this friendship—as well as the connection between Elsa and Errol, who converse freely throughout the film.

After years of shilling her black-and-white wares from a grocery cart in Harvard Square, Dorfman became enamored of the large-format Polaroid camera in 1980. The "B-Side" refers to Dorfman's term for the portrait clients declined to purchase—either for a chemical mishap ("fugitive film," as Morris calls it) or vanity reasons that Dorfman laments, unearthing these rejects from her archive to extol the virtues in each. The B-Side pays tribute to not only her story, but those of the countless personalities (famous and not) whom she's captured over her iconoclastic career.

During our mid-May phone interview from Boulder, Colorado, Morris and Dorfman were in merry spirits, tossing out memories and jokey non-sequiturs like the old friends they clearly are.

VICE: Errol, so many of your documentaries focus on individuals who've committed some very unusual, often heinous, acts. By comparison, Elsa Dorfman seems so wholesome, if daring in her way.
Errol Morris: Well, I might have thought that Elsa was a dangerous felon who's committed many nefarious acts, and was surprised while I was making the movie that she turned out to be a portrait artist.

Elsa, are you a nefarious felon?
Elsa Dorfman: Well, I was arrested once, so that's my cred [Laughs]. And I spent a day in a cell, so that's another cred. That's pretty good for a nice Jewish girl, huh?

Errol, what prompted you to choose to create a portrait of a portrait artist?
Morris: I've known Elsa for a long time—at least 25 years. Her photographs hang in our home. We live with them. She's taken maybe forty or fifty Polaroids of my wife, my son, myself, my mother, my stepfather, our dogs. She's been very much part of our lives and her photographs are part of our lives. It all started because she took a portrait of my son when he was four years old.
Dorfman: His son runs the VICELAND series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia. You should look it up, especially if you're in the west [laughs].

Errol, your signature camera method for interviews—the Interrotron—wasn't used for The B-Side. What led to that choice?
Morris: In part, the desire to do something different. I started shooting a Netflix series, Wormwood, and some of the interviews were done with as many as ten cameras—no Interrotron. I thought, "Let's continue this method with Elsa." We set up in her garage where she has her flat file, using five cameras during the interviews, and a device I'm very fond of called "The Revolution." It's hard to describe. It's like a series of periscopes, mirrors and lenses that allows me to interview Elsa at the same time I'm operating.
Dorfman: It's an ingenious camera on a tripod, and it's very photographic—there probably should have been a picture of it in the film—at least in the credits.

Elsa, the film's emotional climax was your voice-message tape sharing news of the loss of Allen Ginsberg in 1997. The fact that this news was conveyed in a form of technology that we no longer use today seemed itself elegiac. Was this scene planned ahead of time?
Dorfman: We had to hunt and hunt to find a working recorder to play that tape! A couple of the recorders we found were broken because they hadn't been used in so long, but we found one that worked. In those days, there was a literal tape, plus another tape. When we realized that this message about Allen was on the tape, my husband and I decided to save it, but in the last twenty years, we lost track of where it was. Everyone said, "Oh, I saw it in that ashtray," or "I saw it in that box." Everybody was sure they had seen it. Finally, we found it. That in itself was a miracle.

I'd never heard the tape since Allen had died—and I didn't hear it until they were actually filming me. It was a breathtaking moment. Allen had called fifty people when he was dying—going through his Rolodex until he got tired. But according to his community, all of whom were insane savers, they have never located another tape recording from that day.

The film is a portrait of you, Elsa, but also of so many geniuses of your generation.
Certainly, when the film was starting, they were considering the long range of my life—which was getting longer and longer, luckily. I don't think Errol necessarily saw it as a generational portrait when he first got going, but when he saw what he had, he knew it immediately. That's why he's such a genius.
Morris: Or such a good friend [Laughs]. When watching this film, I have to say I've grown to like it. I usually don't like my films, but I like this one. Elsa has taught me a lot about my art, to make the film sound unusually selfish. She's taught me about what I do, about photography in general. There's something so powerful about Elsa's images. If I like the film—and I do like the film—it's because it's about time, memory, and photography. I would puzzle over her photographs, and one thing I would puzzle over is why people would take her work for granted, or dismiss it. Why don't people see it as deeply wonderful and profound, as I do? I find it's often the simplicity of things that masks their profundity, and often masks their complexity.

At the end of the film, Elsa, you say that the fact that your work was overlooked for so long "adds to the pleasure of people liking it now." That seems like something a lot of artists can learn from.
Dorfman: Either that, or I'm terribly neurotic. Or it could be both. But it is the way it is. I couldn't be a different person. I'm stubborn as can be.
Morris: Elsa is related to the filmmaker Fred Wiseman, and one of the things that always impressed me about him is that he would just keep cranking them out. To me the films were great, though they were seen by very few people. Fred was totally uncompromising, and Elsa has also kept at her art.

I don't like the idea of reducing art to some kind of sociological formula—like, "Fred has recorded this part of the 20th century," or "Elsa has provided a record of this artistic community in Cambridge, Massachusetts"—but like Fred, her persistence has created a body of work interesting in its own right. It tells you a lot about things other that what you would think. Ostensibly it's about a middle-class community in the Boston area, but she achieves something above and beyond her specific subject matter. It's really quite remarkable.

So much of this film also seems to about questions of technological obsolescence, like what do I do when my method of making art is no longer available?
One thing that's clear in this movie, if not in life itself, is that everything changes. Someone told me a line given to her by her four-year-old daughter. She said, "Everything's the same, except it changes." There's a line from a late Yeats poem that I also love—called "Lapis Lazuli"—"everything falls and is built again." It's about the impermanence of everything, but we continue building and making things, and reinventing the nature of what we do. That's maybe the ultimate subject of art.

The way Elsa represents that idea is one of the takeaways of the film.
Elsa's work is a powerful combination of the quotidian and a concern for time and memory—the attempt we all engage in to stop the clock, to preserve something about ourselves, and about those we love, that will last. I've been trying to make an uplifting film my entire life, and finally Elsa enabled me to do it.

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