"The Thin Blue Line" is a crime documentary directed by Errol Morris. The director uses a semi-documentary technique to reproduce the facts to track a police murder case. The result is that he successfully unearthed the truth of the facts and settled the grievances. 11 Randall Yaris reversed the case in 1960 and allowed the criminal David Hals to be punished.
This film is more like an interview record than other documentaries. It compares the character’s oral statements with the details of the case, and compares the close-up interview shots of the characters with the close-up case screens, forming the entire documentary. The director reproduced the process of the case through the grafting of logic and camera, and revealed the truth of the case. The beginning of the film is a scene from an interview with two suspects, a reappearance of the scene from the two sides of a 16-year-old boy who shirks responsibility and a 28-year-old youth who believes that he has not committed a crime. The screen is constantly shooting and editing from interview narration to case restoration. The interview involves the female police, eyewitnesses, judges, lawyers, neighbors and friends of the suspect, etc. who are involved in the case. Close-up shots and close-up shots were taken to show the subjective description of the case by different people, record their expressions and characterize the case, guide the audience into the case, and enable the audience to continuously explore the truth of the case.
There are many details worth paying attention to in the filming, of which I pay the most attention to the setting of the film's scene. The composition of a film is generally composed of the relationship between the subject and the companion, the foreground and the background. The composition is also an important part of expressing the meaning of the director's shooting, which is also shown in this interview-like documentary. In the film, the many characters of related events that appear one after another in the film, without the narration and subtitles, and the director's arrangement of the background of their interviews is a good detail for the audience to distinguish the relationship between the characters. For example, when David Harris and Randall Yaris were dictating the case, the layout of the background was similar to a prison cage, and the friends and others who appeared behind had a background similar to the outdoor background of a ranch. For example, for lawyers and others, the background shots are typical in the West. The office or home scene of a higher-class person includes high-end desk lamps, sofas, newspapers, and blinds. The conversion of the shooting background of the characters plays an important role in the exposure of their identities in the film. In the composition design, the character is the main body of the picture, and the character occupies most of the picture. There are a lot of close-up and close-up shots. The main character also occupies the center of the picture. The content of the interview and the expression of the character lead the person to have a deeper understanding of the case. Thinking.
No longer talk about the content of the filming, and the real case shown in the documentary also brings people a lot of thinking. For a person who has no previous convictions and no facts about the crime, everyone uses an ambiguous description of the case to designate him as a criminal, leaving Randall Aris to be wronged for eleven years. He was sentenced and imprisoned with testimony that kept appearing flaws. For a criminal who has always been a habitual offender who has escaped responsibility for stealing cars and guns, the local court and jury have defended him, making him still at large after the crime, and continue to commit crimes. However, the female police officer who was interviewed by the leader suddenly had memories. The passing Miller and his wife identified "criminals." The investigating police threatened the suspect with no evidence. Three generations of judges who had worked at the FBI sentenced the suspect. There is no truth in this. Before being found, this very flawed lie became a fact, just as Randall said in the film, "If there is hell in the world, it is Dallas." Under the law, these people act in accordance with the regulations set by the law, interrogating suspects, prosecuting them in court, and convicting suspects, but they do not act in accordance with the justice of the law, investigating details, finding evidence, and digging for the truth. Is it really like other meanings of the film, "justice is hard to achieve"? I don’t think so. Whether it’s real life or film, the law has always represented justice, which embodies not only the punishment of criminals but also the protection of other people.
The biggest feeling for the whole film is that people have always believed in the justice of this law with many regulations, but the people who use the law are biased.
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