The Thin Blue Line

In this film Randall Adams, serving a life sentence for the murder of a police officer, swears that he did not commit the crime. In the way he dramatises the quest for evidence Morris emphasises the contradictions in the testimony of key witnesses and legal figures involved with the case and the inconclusiveness of the evidence which served to convict Adams, in what becomes an ironic reflection upon the nature of knowledge and truth. As Bill Nichols points out, Morris’s strategy is the converse of that of documentaries which subordinate their own textual voice to that of the witnesses. In the Thin Blue Line the textual voice actually threatens to overwhelm the discrete voices of the social actors (including that of Adams himself) with its own message about the problematics of representations.