Film: The Thin Blue Line

FILM: THE THIN BLUE LINE
1988, dir. Errol Morris

Widely recognized as a monumental achievement in the documentary tradition, The Thin Blue Line is a seminal true-crime document. Formal and stylistic inventiveness pulse through director Errol Morris’ film, which investigates the circumstances around the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood and the subsequent sentencing of two men for their alleged involvement. For the film’s screening in Morris’s 1999 MoMA retrospective, curator Josh Siegel wrote, “The film marked a significant advance in Morris’s distinctive style: letting people tell their sides of the story, and artfully illustrating their accounts with dramatic reenactments, fetishistic close-ups of the telling detail, old movie clips, a hypnotic musical soundtrack by Philip Glass, forensic photographs, family-album snapshots, newspaper clippings, and court documents.”