本片是美国着名独立记录片大师埃罗尔.莫里斯导演的旅行记录片,记录佛罗里达一个小镇居民对事物的古怪看法.镜头选取了几个年老的镇民.据说他们的那些言论让镜头后的莫里斯捧腹大笑.为了一探究竟.让我们进入佛罗里达,弗农那个小镇吧。导演埃罗尔·莫里斯是当之无愧...

1. 拍摄契机：一切都没有那么简单Vernon, Florida is a 1981 documentary film produced and directed by Errol Morris profiling various residents living within the town of Vernon, Florida. Originally titled Nub City, this follow-up to Gates of Heaven initially focused on residents of the Southern town who cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money. After Morris's life was threatened by the subjects of the film, he re-worked Nub City into Vernon, Florida.

[1] 摘自wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film)

具体地说：Recently, he had read a newspaper article about an insurance investigator which mentioned, in passing, how several people in an unidentified Southern town had tried to collect benefits after "accidentally" losing limbs. Morris had tracked down the insurance investigator and learned that the town was Vernon (pop. 883), in the Florida panhandle. Vernon's unofficial nickname was now Nub City. In the hierarchy of nubbiedom, the supremely rewarding self-sacrifice was the loss of a right leg and a left arm, because, so the theory went, "afterward, you could still write your name and still have a foot to press the gas pedal of your Cadillac." Morris stayed in Vernon long enough to read some files at the courthouse, talk to an insurance broker and several nubbies, and receive at least one unambiguous death threat. At the Cat's Eye Tavern one night, a citizen twice Morris's size smiled as he extinguished a cigarette on the lapel of Morris's blazer. Morris remembers thinking that perhaps he had packed the wrong clothes. Also, "I remember it hurt my feelings, because it seemed that, you know, maybe the people in Vernon didn't like me." Rarely did murders take place in Vernon, because, someone explained, "down here, people don't get murdered - they just disappear." Back in Berkeley, Morris tried to write a script for a fiction feature to be called "Nub City." Mainly, he had a pitch line - "Nub City" would be "about people who in order to achieve the American dream literally become a fraction of themselves" - but the plot elements were still gestating. Months went by and he made only slight progress. One afternoon while waiting for inspiration to descend, he was eating lunch in the Swallow, a restaurant in the same building as the Pacific Film Archive, and he saw a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that said, "450 DEAD PETS GOING TO NAPA VALLEY." Suddenly, he had an altogether different idea for a film; "Nub City" would have to wait....In the winter of 1979, Morris went back to Vernon, Florida, and for very little money he was able to rent one of the biggest houses in the county. Vernon was no less xenophobic than any other small Southern town. When the locals asked Morris why he had come there and he gave vague, misleading answers, the typical response was "No, you're here because of the Nub City stuff." He spent much of his time attending revival meetings and driving around to places that had interesting names - Blackhead, Lizard Lake, the Ebro Dog Track. Although he was still enamored of the Nub City idea, he had not yet written a workable screenplay. If he were to try to make a nonfiction film about the Nub City episode, "it would turn into one of those bad investigative documentaries where people are slamming doors in your face." Finally, after several months of insisting "I'm not here about Nub City, I'm not making a film about Nub City," guilt overwhelmed him, he indeed became incapable of making a film about Nub City, and he left town. A year later, he returned, rented the same big house, and spun his wheels some more. Now, however, vacillation carried a steeper price tag, because he had financial help from German television and from WNET, the public-television affiliate in New York. A crew of recent graduates from the New York University film school drove to Vernon in a rented van, bringing with them equipment so heavy that the van blew out two sets of tires on the drive south. When they arrived, Morris had still not decided what the film would be about. A controversy had arisen involving the firing and rehiring of one of the local police officers. Morris felt that the officer's travails were connected with "the Napoleonic ambitions of the king of the nubbies." The king of the nubbies had advised Morris to leave town within twenty-four hours or leave in a casket. When Morris failed to oblige, the king made what seemed a sincere effort to run down Ned Burgess, the cinematographer, with a truck. More or less in desperation - to get the king of the nubbies off his back, to give the public-television people something, anything, for their money - Morris began to film interviews with various interesting citizens of Vernon, among them Roscoe Collins, the cop; Joe Payne, the collector of wild animals (opossum, gopher, tortoise, rattlesnake); Albert Bitterling, the cosmologist with the opera glasses ("Reality - you mean, this is the real world? Ha, ha, ha. I never thought of that"); George Harris and Claude Register, two geezers who discuss how an acquaintance put a shotgun to his forehead and pulled the trigger with his big toe ("And he said, that day, he says, 'That'll be the last thing I ever do is to shoot myself.' Which it was"), "Vernon, Florida" contains not a single reference to Nub City. Rather, as with "Gates of Heaven," the film's subjects are the American vernacular and the malleability of truth. Morris presents Vernon, Florida, as is - no special effects, what you see is what you get - as if he had stumbled across, and without editorial intrusion had agreed to share, an unexplored settlement full of Florence Rasmussens.

[2] 摘自导演官网 http://www.errolmorris.com/content/profile/singer_predilections.html

更具体的英勇实例：

Vernon is named for George Washington’s Virginia home, Mt. Vernon. An old steamboat port between the red hills of Alabama and the white shores of Florida’s Emerald Coast, this pioneer town was the site of a major Indian settlement and is home to what you call “poor country folk”. In the first half of the 20th century, the steamboats stopped running, the sawmill closed, jobs became scarce, and bright young residents left for college and never came back.As for the Nub Club, as they would later be called, someone had to be first. His identity is lost to history, but this much we can guess. One day he took a look at his hand and he compared its future earning potential to the value of his insurance policy and he made a simple calculation. There was an accident. Money changed hands. Word got around. More accidents.L.W.Burdeshaw, an insurance agent in Chipley, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1982 that his list of policyholders included the following: a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot while protecting chickens, a man who lost his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, a man who somehow lost two limbs in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor, and a man who bought a policy and then, less than 12 hours later, shot off his foot while aiming at a squirrel.

Did you know: More than two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident claims in the United States in the late ’50s and early ’60s come from the Florida Panhandle.“To sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City,” writes investigator John Healy, “watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere.” Nearly 50 men in Vernon and surrounding areas collected insurance for these so-called accidents. None were convicted of fraud. But the increased scrutiny – along with some companies’ refusal to sell any more policies in that area – brought an end to the maimings.

[3] 摘自 https://oddculture.com/vernon-florida/ 原引 http://mentalfloss.com/article/67097/nub-city-vernon-floridas-decade-long-insurance-scam

2. 诡异的采访"Vernon, Florida," which is essentially plotless - a pastiche of interviews with a turkey hunter, a policeman, a retired couple who are convinced that a glass jar in their possession contains radioactive sand that grows, a wild-animal collector, a Holy Roller preacher, a worm farmer, and others - evolved haphazardly, almost desperately, from an unwieldy idea Morris had of making a fiction film based upon a bizarre insurance scam. A loquacious man named Albert Bitterling, who appears intermittently throughout "Vernon, Florida," has held a pair of opera glasses against the lens of a camera and photographed the night sky. In one scene, displaying the opaque result, he says, "Of course, as you can see is that picture ain't too good, it's a cheap camera, you get a cheap picture." Then, speaking literally and in metaphor, he encapsulates the filmmaker's dilemma: "Well, of course, you see, when you have a camera... You have a camera and you point it at a certain - Just like if you had a gun. You don't shoot, do you? Well, if you had a gun and you pointed it at something, you're liable to hit what you're pointing at, and then again you might not."

来源同 [2]

据我的一位老师说最开始坐在树下长椅上的老人好像有精神问题十年如一日天天跑去那里坐着，然后导演就过去跟他聊了

那个猎火鸡的狂热男人全程讨论火鸡潜藏在树林翅膀沙沙作响闻风而动，然后坐在一排裱起来的鸡爪子下面追忆自己当年的骁勇大战，关键是全片甚至没有出现一只火鸡的身影

他的原话：“Listen to that sound? Hear that sound? Getting in an out of trees? That flop-flop sound? Mmmmm, that sound you will sure mistake for turkeys. Listen. Hear that flop-flop. Limbs breaking. Hear that good flop, then? Listening to that gives me the turkey fever. Mmmmm, I wish there were as many turkeys as there are buzzards.”

那个警察的笑点见下：Morris went to Vernon, Fla., in the first place to develop ideas for a documentary about American retirement communities. He never made that film Instead, he turned his camera on such Vernon residents as a philosophical old man, a band of fanatic wild turkey hunters, and the local cop.His approach is diabolically simple. He places them in their environment and listens to them. They talk of their dreams, superstitions, fantasies and lifetimes. In the measured words of the old man, speculating on what a turtle must be thinking about, we hear a condensed philosophy of life.The movie is often very funny. The local policeman, in particular, seems to have studied for his job by watching cop shows on TV, and he uses such a bewildering array of law-enforcement jargon it is sometimes impossible to be sure whether he's kidding you or arresting you. His squad car is outfitted with a dazzling array of late-model police equipment, including a two-way radio. But since he's the only cop in, town, there's nobody on the other end of the radio except his wife.The movie's high point comes with the turkey hunters. They talk, think, and dream turkeys. They speculate on a turkey's habits, destination and likely whereabouts; they interpret half-heard turkey mating calls; and they study turkey tracks as if they were destiny's footprints..The turkeys they seek are, alas, hardly ever seen. On the other hand, the movie's old man has a wire cage out in back of his place where the strangest critters live in apparent harmony. He produces and then philosophizes about a turtle, a possum and, if memory serves, a snake."Vernon, Florida" does not exactly make fun of its subjects; it has too much affection for that. But it sees them as originals who sometimes let their enthusiasms run away with them. The movie resembles "Gates of Heaven" in that it is really about the systems people impose on their lives to make a little sense out of the universe. Whether they're obsessed with dogs, turkeys, turtles or radios, they're basically trying to find a pattern for living.

[4] 摘自 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/vernon-florida-1982

3. 他是怎么做到的

导演的纪录片小技巧：Morris has described that strategy as getting subjects to talk for as long as possible while saying very little in return, which entails appearing to listen without really listening—“because if you really start to listen, you feel you have to respond in some way,” he explained in a 1987 Premiereinterview. While that may seem counterintuitive, if not downright rude, it nevertheless echoes the experience of watching these monologues unfold in Gates of Heaven. One listens while simultaneously becoming aware of not entirely listening, especially as the speaker rambles, doubles back, and contradicts. Soon you’re fixing on the face more than tracking the words, and you’re loitering within the still life of the frame, picking up the bronzed baby shoes to the right of pet cemetery owner Floyd McClure’s face, or fixing on the fact that pet mourner Florence Rasmussen spends the entirety of her epic address teetering in her front doorway. You’re picking up information in a fragmented way, as you might unconsciously do with a new acquaintance—which is precisely what these people are. Then you click back to the words and wonder what you’ve missed, and wonder if there was more sense to what was said than you thought.

[5] 摘自CC网站 https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3501-gates-of-heaven-and-vernon-florida-bullshitting-a-bullshitter

观众反馈："It's held up well," Morris said of “Vernon” when he picked up the phone. "It's a movie I'm very proud of. Out of all my movies, it's the one that has the strongest following. People are always coming up to me and telling me how much they like it. It makes me feel good."

[6] 摘自 https://www.tallahassee.com/story/entertainment/columnists/hinson/2014/05/23/mark-hinson-column-return-vernon-florida/9494425/

4. 涉及赫尔佐格的番外Les Blank’s short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” (1980) takes you back to those early days. The backstory: Herzog thought Morris lacked the follow-through necessary to finish a film, and proclaimed that if he did, Herzog would eat this own shoe. Morris did in fact finish the film he was working on, Gates of Heaven, and Herzog followed through on his half of the bargain as well, after Alice Waters of Chez Panisse helped make the shoe more palatable.

[7] 摘自 https://www.popmatters.com/192524-gates-of-heaven-vernon-florida-2495539211.htmlCC版boxset封面！