The Thin Blue Line is a reminder — and I like it as such — it's a reminder that the claims of cinema verité are spurious. - Errol Morris.
The Thin Blue Line tiene varios niveles de lectura. El primero y más obvio consiste en demostrar que Randal en realidad era inocente. El segundo es una crítica al sistema jurídico y legislátivo de EUA, y a la manera en la que tiende a creerse que es infalibe, cuando por el simple hecho de ser operado por humanos, tiene una fuerte probabilidad de equivocarse. El tercero y más interesante consiste en logra cuestionar la realidad y el concepto que tenemos de ella. Esta tercer lectura se aprecia principalmente en la forma en la que está realizado el documental. Todos los re-enactments, la manera en la que están realizadas las entrevistas, en las que no queda claro si son sets o que personajes están en la carcel y cuales están libres, el montaje que utiliza y la forma en la que cuenta la misma historia de distintos puntos de vista, cada vez siendo diferentes los hechos que se cuentan.
En general creo que es una gran película, con un objetivo en mente claro que logra cumplir a la perfección, pues estoy segura de que hasta la gente más crédula tuvo que haberse cuestionado si lo que se mostraba en pantalla era cierto, si se trataba de un documental o de una ficción, si podía confiar en lo que sus sentidos le transmitían, y eso para mí, es más de lo que la mayoría de las películas son capaces de realizar, pues lograr que una audiencia pásiva se despierte y comience a "pensar" es algo verdaderamente admirable.
Entrevista a Errol Morris sobre The Thin Blue Line:
In The Thin Blue Line you combined traditional interviews with Philip Glass's mesmerizing score, and then used 35mm film and commercial cinematography to illustrate and reillustrate the different characters's contradictory versions of what happened the night of the murder. It's a very controlled approach to the documentary form. Many of your visual techniques — such as the theatrical reenactment — which are used frequently in nonfiction television today, were first conceived of in this film. What was the reaction when it first came out?
When The Thin Blue Line came out, the use of reenactments was considered heretical. The movie was endlessly criticized, and then endlessly imitated! People see it today and they say, “Well, what is so unusual about this? I see this everywhere.” Well, yes, it is everywhere, but it wasn't everywhere when The Thin Blue Line was made!
Did you have a clear vision of the final film before you started? Was using Glass's music, and stylish reenactments to illustrate the flaws in the eyewitness testimony, part of your initial concept?
No. The Thin Blue Line is a perfect example of a movie that found itself as it was being put together. It was started with an entirely different project in mind. I knew nothing about Randall Adams, nothing about David Harris. In fact, no one knew anything about Randall Adams or David Harris. For all intents and purpose, this was a closed case. It had been solved to almost everybody's satisfaction. Randall Adams had been tried and convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood. And that was that. There were a few scattered people who felt that there had been a miscarriage of justice, but they were very few and far between. I stumbled on the case purely by accident.
How did you meet Randall Adams?
I was planning to make a movie about a Dallas psychiatrist, and had started the movie. And at the suggestion of Dr. James Grigson [featured in the original concept for the film] I went and interviewed over a dozen people that he had helped put on death row. Randall Adams was one of them. And the intention, of course, was not to uncover miscarriages of justice; the intention was just to interview, as Dr. Grigson described them, “cold-blooded killers” who are, quote unquote, “different than you me.”
You weren't looking to tell Adams's story—a failure of the justice system.
No. To illustrate some of the things that Grigson was saying, I met Randall Adams again. I picked a dozen or so names, but the choice of those names was random. It could have been another dozen or so. Grigson had been responsible for putting 30, 40, 50 people on death row. So I read about the other stories as well, but as I read about Adams's story I slowly but surely became convinced that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice. And then the movie changed. It was no longer a movie of Dr. Grigson. It was a movie about Randall Adams. It was The Thin Blue Line.
After you stopped filming your original concept about Dr. Grigson, and decided to start from scratch and focus on Randall Adams, how long did the filmmaking process take?
Well, when I met Adams, that was the beginning of over a year and a half, close to two years, of tracking people down, interviewing them, of doing research. I've pointed out many times, I believe this is true. You don't always know about the claims you make on behalf of yourself.
Aside from the stylistic innovation, what makes The Thin Blue Line a film that so many filmmakers refer to for inspiration?
Well, The Thin Blue Line is unusual. It may even be unique. It's not telling the story about a murder case, it's not about an investigation. It is an investigation! The investigation was done, in part, with a camera — culminating with David Harris's confession to me. It was on tape — following the malfunctioning of my camera in my interview with him — the tape on which he essentially confesses to the murder!
I read all the time that The Thin Blue Line is the movie that got an innocent man out of prison, saved an innocent man from death row. But what's forgotten is that it's the movie and the investigation that did it. You were a filmmaker, and a detective. How did your approach allow that to happen?
The material I uncovered in the interviews was investigative in nature. Interviews often take the form of a set of questions that people ask, and they already know the answers that they're looking for. They are not investigative. And I try very, very hard to make the interviews that I do something other than about the things that I want to hear, or expect to hear, or think I'm going to hear. I try to be at least open to the possibility that something unexpected is going to happen. And that was certainly true in The Thin Blue Line. It's an investigation I'm very, very proud of. I'm proud of the movie, I'm even prouder of the investigation.
You said earlier that you started to discover “slowly but surely” when you were talking to Adams and Harris that there had been a miscarriage of justice. What tipped you off that perhaps the wrong man was in prison?
Randall Adams, of course, told me he was innocent, but, of course, I didn't believe him. The first red flag was when I went to Austin. By statute every capital murder trial in Texas is appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. You can go to that court, and in the basement they have the transcripts of every capital murder trial. You can sit there, and you can read. And I was reading. I could see the frame but I couldn't see the picture, and that was true of the transcript. There was some thing wrong with that story.
Why did you sense the story was wrong?
It all centered on David Harris, on the star prosecution witness who claimed to be in the passenger's seat of the car, and to have observed at close range Randall Adams's murder of Robert Wood. There was just something wrong with it. Then I started to uncover more and more material about David Harris. And as more and more stuff accumulated, it became clear that I was dealing with a guy with an incredible history of violence—particularly to authority figures. He had tried to kill his commanding officer in the army. He had tried to kill another police officer in California. He had been on a crime spree the week that the Dallas police officer was killed, even though he was 16 years old. Then, of course, I met David Harris and started following him around. And he had just been paroled from prison. He had been in prison in California; he'd just been paroled to his parents in Vidor, Texas. And we met, and we continued to meet. Then I was scheduled to film him, and he didn't show up for his appointment to be filmed! He had disappeared, and within the week he turned up in Jefferson County Jail in Beaumont, Texas, indicted for the murder of Mark Walter Mays, and was subsequently convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He was actually executed earlier this year.
How was your investigation conducted? Was this a team of people you were working with? Or was it you in your apartment, going through files?
It was principally me, interviewing people, going through files, doing research of one kind or another.
Each night, you're weighing the evidence of your suspects?
Yes. When the material accumulated, I [was considering the likelihood of] two stories going on at once. One is a story about inculpatory evidence and another is a story about exculpatory evidence. You're looking at two things, if you like, at the same time. You're looking for evidence that shows you that Randall Adams did it, or that David Harris did it, and you're looking for evidence that Adams didn't do it, or David Harris didn't do it. And as I went through the case, slowly but surely, the mountain of evidence connecting David Harris with the murder grew and grew and grew, and the evidence connecting Randall Adams with the murder just continued to shrink. Until there was scarcely any left.
Tell me about the impact The Thin Blue Line had on the case, and the aftermath once the film was released.
Well, it had impact in one very definite sense: Material from the film — actually several interviews from the film — were submitted as evidence in federal and state court. Material in those interviews actually showed that the major witnesses against Randall Adams committed perjury, one by one by one. So eventually the conviction was overturned, and Adams walked. And [later] I would hear stories about how the Dallas district attorney's office was going to retry him for the murder, but of course that was just, in my view, idle boasting, because they had no case. The case was gone. There's no way to retry him because the case that they had made had evaporated.
During a lengthy filmmaking investigation like this, where does your point of view factor into the storytelling?
Ultimately, it's my point of view, that's part of the movie. I mean, these are all movies made by me in some capacity. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by “point of view.”
In The Thin Blue Line, and in many of your films, you are filming multiple points of view. But in the end you need to make a decision on how you present each of them to the audience. How do you make those difficult editorial choices?
In The Thin Blue Line there were people who thought they knew what happened, and thought they saw what happened. But did not know what happened, and probably did not see much of anything! Or, at the very least, were mistaken about what they saw. So the visuals are ironic in a very dramatic sense. They're illustrations of untruths. They're not dramatic reenactments of reality. They're dramatic reenactments of unreality. And you could say accurately that part of my point of view is to show how easily we can be deceived by visual images and by appearances. Part of it is that I'm telling a visual story, and telling you that the visual story is undermining itself at the same time. And it's one of the things that makes The Thin Blue Line a really interesting film for me.
You say it was “endlessly criticized, and then endlessly imitated.” Where?
I've been accused of having created reality television with that movie. And to have spawned a whole series of reality shows based on reenactment. What's interesting is, in The Thin Blue Line the reenactments are never purported to show you what really happened. They weren't a way of illustrating reality. They were telling you something quite different: that reality often is ineluctable. That it's very hard to grab a hold of. In this particular instance, filmmaking was used not in that standard documentary sense of someone running around with a handheld camera trying to observe a set of events, it was used as an investigative tool, if you like. All of those tools are in service of trying to figure out what is real or, if you prefer, what really happened. Whether it's interviews, or reenactments that bring you deeper into the mystery of what happened, or graphics that stress certain aspects of the story, which to me were important. Whether it's the movie times — times that the movies [Adams was watching at the time of the murder] ran at the 183 Drive In — or the strange mystery of Randall Adams, whose incomplete so-called confession was no confession at all. It's designed to take you into the story in a powerful and dramatic way.
Cuestionando el Cinéma Vérité:
When you say “someone running around with a handheld camera,” you seem to have contempt for that school of filmmaking. Is the cinema verité approach something that you are reacting to, aesthetically?
That film [The Thin Blue Line] is a reminder — and I like it as such — it's a reminder that the claims of cinema verité are spurious.
Why?
It shows that style does not guarantee truth. The use of available light and a handheld camera does not mean that what you are doing is any more truthful than anything else. Truth is a pursuit, it's a quest. And proof is certainly in the pudding in this particular instance, because the film, and the evidence accumulated in making the film, led to this man's release from prison. And that's hardly ever happened, if it's happened at all, in any other film that I can think of.
Were you responding to the verité approach with Gates of Heaven as well?
Yes. Gates of Heaven was very much a reaction to verité. In fact, we used to joke while we were making it that we'll take all the principles of verité and stand them on their head. Instead of a handheld camera, I'll make sure the camera's always on a tripod! And instead of observing people, and being as unobtrusive as possible, I'll have people talk directly to the camera, I'll have them look directly at the camera, and be as obtrusive as possible! Instead of lightweight equipment I'll use heavy equipment! Instead of not staging anything, I'll stage everything!
I assume you're going to throw out sync sound, too?
No, there's still sync sound there. It's also what the people say, the language that they use. They use real language. It's not been scripted by me. That's the documentary element. And it shows, I think, in one very powerful way that you can tell a documentary story completely differently than in the verité idea, and produce some very, very interesting and powerful real stuff in the process.
Why did you feel the need to create a new aesthetic that was purposefully responding to the principles or claims of verité?
The claim annoys me. The claim seems to me clearly false. Self-evidently false. Style is not truth. Just because you pick a certain style does not mean that you somehow have solved the Cartesian riddle of what's out there, that you no longer have to think about anything. You just adopt a methodology. It's almost like thinking that because The New York Times uses a certain font, that guarantees the truthfulness of every sentence written in the newspaper. That's total nonsense.
FUENTES:
- Adobe Design Center. Errol Morris Revealing Unexpected Realities. http://www.adobe.com/uk/designcenter/dialogbox/errolmorris/
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