The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)

I'll be doing quite a few of these blogs on documentaries for the next few months, because I am taking a Documentary Cinema course this term. The class focuses on Errol Morris and Michael Moore. The first film we screened was The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988).

I've seen The Thin Blue Line credited in a few non-academic sources as being the first to use scripted re-enactment sequences in a documentary style, or the first to do so in a crime drama doc. This is interesting to me because the whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking that it seemed like a very well put together crime drama TV show, with interviews. The way in which Morris uses the scripted scenes is very clever. He only shows you things people say that Morris himself believes to be lies. Throughout the film it is clear that Morris' intention is to show that it was David Harris that killed the police officer that night, and that Randall Adams is innocent; yet we never see a re-enactment of Harris shooting the cop, it is always Adams.

The re-enactment scenes themselves are beautifully shot. In order to make clear that these are re-tellings and not the way it actually happened, Morris makes them extremely stylistic. Long shadows, pronounced colors, extreme close-ups, slow motion all combine to make clear that it is a memory, and even take away from the credibility of the memory with a surreal feel.

The Phillip Glass score is absolutely remarkable. It plays an eerie counterpart to the images and interviews. It goes almost unnoticed, yet is essential to the success of the film.

In this age of court dramas, and crime scene shows The Thin Blue Line can appear to fall in line with the rest. But bearing in mind it came out in 1988 and actually helped get a man out of prison that was apparently innocent it is a very effective piece of filmmaking.