The Thin Blue Line is an amazing action packed documentary that has to thank it’s production a lot for its success. It is both a documentary and a cop action short. The murder scene is a reenacted scene that changes as the story develops. It is shot with two different cars to play out two different scenarios. It is also shot with a strong use of inserts. The inserts give an intimacy to the scene, making you feel present and knowing every detail. This helps build and retain view interest as they slowly unfold a long case study. They do this by including shots like the partner drinking her milk shake at the beginning. At first it seems like a harmless milkshake, but then you learn that it was this milkshake that kept the partner in the car, when she should’ve been helping. The sense of abandonment that the partner had in that scene and the chaos of the murder is captured by seeing the milkshake fly out of the cop window and spill all over the road. Little shots like this kept interest and immersed the view in intimate detail.
Reenacting scenes are a very powerful form of filming that documentaries use to keep viewers interested. It is very successful and most widely used by the history and discovery channel when they reenact great human feats of surviving animal attacks or to show life as it would have been back in the caveman era. Now we see more and more documentaries that are more of a production and a reconstruction of a past event. Seeing more of these kind of scenes in documentaries make me wonder what makes the difference between a documentary like thin blue line and a historical fiction movie like Sully or Captain Phillips? When does one become fiction and the other a documentary? Is it adding dialogue, or when you ever so slightly stray from the truth?