In this blog post, I will examine the intersection between documentary and narrative film through Errol Morris’s ‘A Thin Blue Line’.
The philosopher Clément Rosset once said, “The reason film can be an art form lies in its paradoxical position on the boundary between reality and art—that is, between the same and the other. Furthermore, it is more important for cinema to capture reality than to represent it; cinema presents reality, but it cannot be a true representation of reality.”
Since its inception, cinema has been deeply intertwined with realism. According to Ross, the measure of the realism cinema pursues depends on its ability to detect “the existence of reality that exists, or the existence that exists within reality.” At this point, the issue of direction arises: how and in what spirit should the reality and existence detected by the film be expressed?
Viewed from the perspective of mise-en-scène, the moment the director passes reality through the camera (lens) and transfers it into the fixed framework of a scene, that reality is already transcended and replaced by a “cinematic reality” that has been reproduced and reinterpreted. Depending on whether the reality outside the camera, upon colliding with the medium, becomes diegesis or mimesis, we see a distinction between documentary—centered on recording—and narrative film, which incorporates fictional elements.
However, documentary and narrative film do not necessarily have to be separated. In that they both take reality as their source and focus on actual existence, they fundamentally aim toward realism. In ‘The Thin Blue Line’, American documentary director Errol Morris simultaneously employs documentary montage and narrative film mise-en-scène, juxtaposing the recording of truth with the reconstruction of falsehood to guide the audience toward a gradual understanding of the facts.
Based on an incident that occurred in Dallas in 1976, ‘The Thin Blue Line’ opens with a view of the city at night and then presents interviews with the prime suspect, Randall Adams, and David Harris, who was with him at the time. Their conflicting statements immediately imbue the film with a sense of immediacy and reality for the audience.
Randall Adams claims he is not the perpetrator, while David Harris identifies him. The detective and prosecutor responsible for the arrest and indictment treat Randall as the culprit. These authoritative voices suppress Randall’s own voice, and as the interviews unfold, news articles and investigative records are inserted as interludes, conveying the narrative of the case on a diegetic level. The screen functions as a window displaying the record of the incident.
“A Thin Blue Line” does not use voice-over narration, yet it clearly asserts the innocence of a man convicted of murder. The film’s voice affirms or undermines the narrative through the juxtaposition of images and interviews, and the images are reconfigured whenever the characters’ voices change.
As the voice transforms into images and the images back into voice, the film draws closer to the truth that the authoritarian city sought to distort. In the conclusion, the true culprit is revealed to be David Harris, not Randall, yet the film does not attempt to judge David Harris again; instead, it plays Randall’s final interview. His voice, captured within the image of the tape recorder, stops the audience in their tracks more powerfully than any narration could.
By freezing the movement of the images and focusing on the voice within the tape recorder, the final scene causes the screen to bring the audience down from its authoritative position. When Randall Adams mentions the “scapegoat” and suggests that there are many others who, like him, have been wrongfully convicted, the contrast with the Dallas police officer implies that while the cinematic reality has ended, the actual reality has not.
This is how the film approaches realism by demonstrating the continuity of reality—neither complete presence nor complete absence.
Reflective documentaries are self-conscious not only about form and style but also about strategy, structure, conventions, and audience expectations. They use parody, irony, and satire to make the audience question the documentary’s self-evident claim to truth. These devices are used to problematize or subvert the realism of documentary representation.
In ‘The Thin Blue Line’, various visual tools are employed, such as reenactments juxtaposed with interviews, vignettes, black-and-white scenes, and image inserts. While existing reflective documentaries have raised questions about representation (mimesis), this film actively utilizes representation to break down the boundaries between the audience and (narrative) film, as well as between fact and fiction.
If the documentary is a window into diegesis, fiction attempts to create distance between the narrative film and the audience through representation. As a result, the audience adopts a more objective perspective and accepts the screen as a framework for mimesis. The credibility derived from the objectivity of photographic images leads the audience to believe in the existence of the represented subjects.
Reenacted images visualize the characters’ voices while simultaneously providing room to critique their words. Voices attempting to repeat falsehoods about the past are presented as a sequence of images, and the aesthetics of satire emerge when the irony between words and images is revealed. The gap between falsehood and distortion, and between imposed truths and actual facts, encourages the audience to maintain a distance.
Therefore, while the reproduced image exists within the framework of mimesis, if the director’s perspective and values—filtered through the camera—enable the audience to perceive the actual truth through their own eyes, then even mimesis reproduced as fiction can return to the realm of truth.
As a discourse on reality, the documentary relies on explicitly stating that it confronts reality directly and is guided by it. The documentary employs realism as a tool for making direct, ontological claims about reality and establishes its relationship with history through specific assertions of truth.
The technical processes of photography and filmmaking are interpreted as mechanisms that guarantee that the image is a record of something. In this sense, it can be said that all films possess documentary elements in some way. Ultimately, an image that recognizes and records “the existence of real reality, or the existence that is real within reality” can become a documentary, regardless of mimesis and diegesis, frame and window, or recorded truth and fiction.
The frame that indulges in the reality of its subject, uses this as the basis for realism, and reflects upon it through the medium of “film” provides a reason for documentaries and narrative films to share and coexist. Errol Morris’s work can be read as one way of reflecting on precisely that space.
