The Thin Blue Line. 1988. USA. Directed by Errol Morris. 35mm. 103 min.
Arguably one of the most influential films of the last 50 years, The Thin Blue Line is a seminal true-crime document. Formal and stylistic inventiveness pulse through the 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.”