"The justice of the Statue of Liberty is graded, justice? How to say it? She just closed her eyes. The scales in her hands can move up and down." Repeated criminal Harris must be mocking American justice. The American documentary "The Thin Blue Line" presents us with a judicial "farce" in which the so-called "authoritative and fair" judicial trial differs greatly from the truth by using interviews with characters and replays of characters.
Different from traditional documentaries, the documentary "The Thin Blue Line" does not have a narration, and the whole film advances the progress of the story through interviews with relevant personnel. The film starts with an interview with Adams who was wronged, and then everyone involved in the case slowly appears, narrating their views on the case in front of the camera. The conversation of one person leads to the next person, Adams, Harris, police officers, judges, witnesses, lawyers, eyewitnesses appeared one by one. When interviewing the relevant personnel of the case, director Morris used close-up shots to show the characteristics of human nature by capturing the details of the characters' faces. According to each person's testimony, guide the audience step by step closer to the truth of the case. Bring the audience into the case, attract the audience's interest in watching, and make the original boring documentary interesting and watchable, but it will not be divorced from reality. When watching the film, according to the testimony of the relevant personnel, the audience seems to be in the case, like a detective, who is also investigating the case. The audience no longer passively obtains information, but actively seeks the truth of the facts.
Another highlight of the film is that it adopts the form of character replay and scene reproduction, combining the testimony of real people with the process of simulating the occurrence of the case. Such as the crime scene where the police were killed, the sound of gunshots in the night, the situation when Adams was being interrogated by the police, plus a lot of empty footage, such as: the city of Dara in the night, the flashing lights of the police car, the scene of the interrogation Typewriters, etc., accompanied by slow motion and composer Philip's soundtrack, make the film have a film noir image style, giving people a eerie, mysterious feeling, which plays an important role in rendering the atmosphere and advancing the plot, making people feel The sound is in the mirror, allowing the audience to understand the whole incident step by step very intuitively, and follow the film to solve the mystery in their hearts bit by bit. So far, the truth has come out, and a lively American judicial black satire has been shown to the world.
We can feel that the director has his own attitude, but still insists that the audience use their own eyes and minds to understand the truth of the incident, because there is always only one truth!
The only shortcoming of the whole film is that during the interviews with the relevant personnel of the case, the names and identities of the characters were not explained with subtitles. Because of a criminal case recorded in this film and interviews with relevant personnel, if the identities of the characters are not explained, it is easy to confuse the relationship between the characters during the viewing process.
"The Thin Blue Line" is known as the representative work of the birth of "New Documentary Film". In the field of documentaries, the film changed the original mode of traditional documentaries to show the essence of reality, and created a new mode of character replay and scene reproduction. I think the greatest value of the film is not only here, but also in making a wrongful conviction overturned, exposing the weakness of human nature, and at the same time questioning the justice of the American judicial system. Does the thin blue line of the mighty force between society and criminals work as they should? After all, fairness and justice are the common aspirations of all mankind.
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