The Power of the Cinema

Directly after watching The Thin Blue Line, I called a friend of mine who has internet access(as I do not) and asked him to check wikipedia.org for the name Randall Adams and see if it was mentioned whether or not the film aided in prompting a reinvestigation of his case. It did. Randall Adams spent 12 years in prison for the murder of a police officer before being found not guilty.

The Thin Blue Line did what cinema is supposed to do, it created awareness and made a difference. It is a powerful and gripping documentary that manages to retain it’s own style while delivering factual information through talking head interviews.

The shot design for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line is aesthetically pleasing without being over the top, the lighting is elegant and the various color schemes maintain an aesthetic continuity. The re-enacted scenes are purposely and openly stylistic, the shots themselves bring awareness to the fact that what is being watched is indeed cinema—they do not pose as ‘real life,’ they do not act as something to trick the viewer. This is evident in the use of close-ups, especially on extraneous objects such as car lights, shots taken from under the car as the police officer walks past, the twisting red siren light that is repeated for dramatic effect, and especially the shot from outside the police interrogation room as the officer speaks with Randall Adams. The walls a bright blue and the windows framing the important elements of the scene. All the components of these re-enactments speak of cinema, they have their own voice and their own look that allow the viewer to be drawn in without forgetting that these are indeed re-enactments and not real-live events. Also, the juxtaposition of truth with archival cinema footage works to create an understanding of the manipulation inherent in documentaries.

However, the greatest significance of The Thin Blue Line comes at the end with the last interview of David Harris in which he effectively confesses to the murder of Robert Wood and to the innocence of Randall Adams. The delivery of this interview is incredibly effective. While all the others show David Harris is his bright orange prison uniform against a cell background, looking healthy and confident, this interview is audio only. The audio is scratchy and Harris sounds tired, it is through the use of subtitles that the audience is able to clearly understand what is being said. On the screen, there is just the image of a small tape recorder playing, the kind of recorder one would assume caught the conversation the audience is now hearing. The wheels of the recorder heads turn slowly and cuts to extreme close ups of various parts of the recorder emphasize the intense significance of what is being said. Randall Adams has been jailed wrongfully for 11 years. The case of Randall Adams makes his innocence pretty clear, but it is this interview that sets it in stone, the lead witness to the murder is indeed the murderer – because he says so himself.