I really like reasoning films, and I am a loyal fan of various detective logic suspense films. I like the feeling of revealing the truth in the end. So I watched this film with great expectations. The narrative clues of this film are very clear, and it is very different from the direct movies I have been exposed to recently. It mainly adopts the recurrence of scenes and the interspersed appearance of interviews with multiple parties involved in the incident. Compared to a documentary, it is more like a third-perspective reasoning game. And it reminds me of legal programs where various scenes and storytelling intersect on the Legal Channel. But rather, some of the techniques of this film are the origins of the production methods of the popular programs of the Legal Channel. The whole film has an extraordinary sense of subjective participation. At the beginning, there is a particularly exciting part, which is that the shots of the shooting in the scene restoration and the shot positions of the forensic research quickly corresponded to the shots to switch there one by one. Suddenly, there was a feeling of being pulled into the night more than 40 years ago and staring at the scene more thoroughly from the perspective of God. Who is lying? Who is telling the truth? At the beginning, when Adams finished talking about the police's brutal confession, but the police gave a completely different explanation, doubts and ups and downs in the plot appeared. Different parties kept repeating and enriching the whole story, cooperating with the scene reproduction and still photos of still life materials to reveal the truth step by step. In the end, everyone suddenly realized that Adams, who was arrested that year, was innocent. In the end, because of the influence of this film, many years of unjust cases were settled. Suddenly, I think of both Grierson and Vertov's proposal that "movies should serve social ideals", emphasizing that movies are an effective medium for influencing the public. Many critics say that this film is a rebellion against the traditions of many documentaries, but in some respects it also goes the same way as tradition.
In fact, I still feel a little bit boring and incomprehensible in general. When I watched the first time, I was a little slack when I was attentively watching the documentary when I was in the middle of it. I was a little wandering but suddenly realized that "I seem to have mistaken people. The plot is different from what I imagined!" Then, as if awakened, he quickly dragged the progress bar back to watch it again. If I were to say something about this film that I don’t like very much, it must be 99% not to mark the person’s name and profile. The first time I want to clarify the characters and details is really too much brainstorming. Maybe it's the reason why I'm used to watching the simple and straightforward video now where the characters are subtitled on the side as soon as they appear. However, the identity of the characters and so on can actually be inferred from what they said, perhaps this is also one of the interesting things of this film. After watching it several times and combining some explanations, the whole process of discovering the truth and perfecting the reasoning by myself is something that most other documentaries can't bring.
ps: The music really feels great! !
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