Look at the fil­mog­ra­phy of doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris, and two themes jump right out: first, the extent to which we humans can obsess, and sec­ond, the intel­lec­tu­al, legal, and mechan­i­cal appa­ra­tus­es we build around death. Gates of Heav­en gave us a tale of duel­ing pet ceme­ter­ies. The Thin Blue Line painstak­ing­ly inves­ti­gat­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion — a botched one, of a mur­der. A Brief His­to­ry of Time and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Con­trol offered the thoughts and the­o­ries of men bent on tam­ing lions, trim­ming hedges to per­fec­tion, build­ing small robots, study­ing naked mole-rats, and know­ing the nature of the uni­verse. Mr. Death, a for­tu­itous inter­sec­tion of sub­jects if ever a film­mak­er had one, fol­lows a man whose devo­tion to build­ing a more humane exe­cu­tion sys­tem brought him to the wrong side of — which is to say, into the favor of — a pack of Holo­caust deniers. Though released under the aus­pices of ESPN and the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Mor­ris’ lat­est short, Team Spir­it, looks at a slice of human­i­ty prac­ti­cal­ly made for his fea­ture-length doc­u­men­taries: sports fans so obsessed that they arrange to express their team affil­i­a­tion even in death.

One fan had his body not laid in a cas­ket, but propped up in a reclin­er and draped in a Steel­ers blan­ket, as if asleep — in front of a tele­vi­sion play­ing a Steel­ers game. Anoth­er went buried entire­ly in Cow­boys attire, and request­ed that all her funer­al’s atten­dees, priest includ­ed, wear the jer­sey as well. A NASCAR fan who nev­er got to dri­ve on the track did, ulti­mate­ly, ride a few laps on it, albeit as an urn of ash­es. A funer­al home direc­tor remem­bers a fan who request­ed every­thing at his cer­e­mo­ny be Ravens pur­ple. “That’s my first mem­o­ry of any sort of sports-relat­ed funer­al we did,” he explains. “Until we got this Ori­oles cas­ket.” As a mere­ly casu­al view­er of sports, I’ve nev­er quite grasped the process by which one picks a team to fol­low, to root for, to love; clear­ly, none of these depart­ed faced such doubts. With its first-per­son Inter­ro­tron inter­views and Philip Glass-esque score, Team Spir­it feels of a piece with the rest of the Mor­ris canon, a body of work that has over and over again found the thor­ough­ly human cur­rents in sub­cul­tures that seemed unreach­ably out on the fringe.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Cap­tures Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing Cham­pi­on “El Wingador”

“They Were There” — Errol Mor­ris Final­ly Directs a Film for IBM

Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Trib­ute to Stephen Hawk­ing, A Brief His­to­ry of Time

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Think about all the big cin­e­mat­ic ideas Stan­ley Kubrick real­ized — Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clock­work Orange — and then imag­ine the ones he did­n’t. You can do bet­ter than imag­in­ing, actu­al­ly, since, the direc­tor left behind enough evi­dence of abort­ed works for Wikipedia to put togeth­er an entire page called “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s unre­al­ized projects.” He want­ed to adapt Calder Will­ing­ham’s Nat­ur­al Child and Ste­fan Zweig’s The Burn­ing Secret, but the mate­r­i­al proved too con­tro­ver­sial for the con­tent restraints of the Hays Code. He want­ed to make a Holo­caust film with Isaac Bashe­vis Singer, who declined; he want­ed to make anoth­er Holo­caust film with Julia Roberts, but Steven Spiel­berg put out Schindler’s List first. (He ulti­mate­ly deemed the Holo­caust cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly unap­proach­able, as he did The Lord of the Rings when the Bea­t­les pre­sent­ed him that idea.) He want­ed to adapt Umber­to Eco’s Fou­cault’s Pen­du­lum, “toyed” with Patrick Süskind’s Per­fume, con­sid­ered rein­vent­ing pornog­ra­phy… the list goes on.

Napoleon casts a shad­ow over all of these frag­ments. Though Kubrick nev­er made his life of Napoleon Bona­parte, he nev­er seemed to for­get the idea, either; he claimed to have read over 500 books about the man in years of prepa­ra­tion for a shoot that nev­er came. David Hem­mings was to play his Napoleon, Audrey Hep­burn his Josephine. The pro­jec­t’s ever more intim­i­dat­ing bud­get — vast, loca­tion-filmed bat­tle scenes pre­sum­ably hav­ing some­thing to do with that — and the release of Sergei Bon­darchuk’s War and Peace and Water­loo sank the project, but you can still read its screen­play online. Taschen, pub­lish­er of lav­ish, visu­al­ly intense tomes, pro­duced the video above on the process behind Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Nev­er Made, their book — or rather, their enor­mous hol­low book filled with small­er books — that dis­tills the nonex­is­tent film’s remains. Don’t have enough room on your shelf? Then take a look at Vice mag­a­zine’s “Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Napoleon: A Lot of Work, Very Lit­tle Actu­al Movie” instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.