The power of documentary film comes from the robustness of its subject. The vividness and texture of real people with real, albeit “unreal,” stories are inherently moving. They speak to the viewer in a deep yet almost indefinable and indescribable way. They remind us that the best stories that we, as human society, could ever imagine have actually occurred. The best documentaries are those that capture the coarseness and the beauty, the tragedy and the heartbreak, the injustice and the redemption of life. These are ideas that move us in a variety of ways. We get angry, sad, pensive, distraught. We wring our hands or dry our eyes because we can identify with these people and, more importantly, with their stories. We want to console them or bring justice to their lives. Simply, good documentary films create an emotional bond between the viewer and the subject. After all, the subjects of documentary film making are real, breathing, eating entities that speak to the viewer with a both a sense of commonality and experience. Their stories share common ground with our stories, their heartache reminds us of ours.

Errol Morris’ films, Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line, encapsulate the good and bad in life in a way that is both indiscernibly real and extraordinarily worthwhile. Their subject matter is very different but at its core, they both deal with the ideas of truth and purpose, life and loss. Morris engages viewers on both a personal and philosophical level; he hints at the ideas of right and wrong, true and false. He is compassionately satirical and relentlessly intriguing. His subjects are unpredictable and ridiculous and they reek of a certain luxurious outlandishness. They are also, however, easy to identify with. We see little bit of ourselves in those mourning the death of a beloved pet and the wrongfully accused. They engage us cerebrally, emotionally, hypothetically. Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line are both messy, complicated films that reject linear plots or director pro-activeness and while both present a sense of moral righteousness, the viewer is never explicitly accosted in terms of certainty or sensationalism.

Errol Morris has long been known as a documentary film maker who creates unarrated films that are guided by the subject and their story. His first film, Gates of Heaven, was created when Morris was 33. He had no formal training or specific outline for the movie. Rumor has it that German Director Werner Herzog told Morris that “You'll never make a film, but if you do I'll come and eat my shoe at the premiere.” (Singer 1989) At the premier of Gates of Heaven in 1981, Herzog boiled and ate his shoe. More importantly than the film’s aura, however, is its actual content. Gates of Heaven is an 85 min. film that, on the periphery, seems to be about pet cemeteries. But Gates of Heaven is more than just a quirky story with grainy production and oddball characters; it’s about pain and loss, memories and aspirations, life and death. Film Critic Roger Ebert, who lists it as one of the 10 greatest films ever made, once said that Morris’ “1978 documentary is surrounded by layer upon layer of comedy, pathos, irony, and human nature. I have seen this film perhaps 30 times, and am still not anywhere near the bottom of it: All I know is, it's about a lot more than pet cemeteries.” (Ebert 1997)

Thin Blue Line has a very different, and on some level, more socially “important” subject matter. The film is centered on a man, Randall Adams, wrongly imprisoned for the murder of a Dallas police officer. As the film begins, Adams has been in jail 11 years, his original sentence of death by electrocution commuted to life in prison. The movie clearly suggests that the murder was actually committed by David Harris, a squirrelly “problem child” in jail for an unrelated crime. As it turns out, Harris was the one who fingered Adams in the shooting. Obviously, a police officer dying in the line of fire is sensational event but Morris fights the urge to paint any aspect of the situation in an off-color or melodramatic manner. Instead, he simply allows the subjects of the film- mostly Adams and Harris but also a variety of peripheral characters such as the Judge and DA – to talk about the events. Through their frank, though often meandering and biased discourse, the viewer comes upon the realization that the accused is an innocent man. In fact, it was the Thin Blue Line that has widely been accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams (still in jail at the time of filming), off of death row and back into freedom.

While both films have a decidedly different subject matter, they both deal with human emotions on a very personal level. In some ways, both films are about the people recounting their stories as much as they are about the actual story. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that Morris does not, in either film, accord time to witnesses and participants solely on their role in the story. He seems, rather, to allocate time based on the personality of each interviewee. For example, in Thin Blue Line, Judge Metcalf does not provide more information than Adam’s two defense attorneys, but he receives more time because he is a mixture of interesting and strange.

It is readily apparent that both films share the common surface aspect of being wholly driven by the subjects via interview. Morris, as a rule, seems to completely avoid any real sense of director participation in both Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven (although he does so in his later film, Fog of War). Further, both films avoid recognizing the subject being interviewed by title box or any other configuration. It is up to the viewers to discern who, exactly, is speaking. And, it should be pointed out, why they are speaking. This is, in a sense, a classic actualization of John Grierson’s definition of documentary as being the “the creative treatment of actuality.” (Eitzen 1995) Morris forces the viewer, at least in the character’s introductory phase, to be judged at face value. The words each chracter uses, their mannerisms, and the way they present themselves dictate how each individual is to be perceived. At the same time, the backdrops and lack of any chracter identification by Morris are surely borne out of some sense of artistic creation. Morris is essentially creating a situation where the subjects are to be judged on a much more personal level than simply faces on screen. Much like day-to-day life, the interviewees are (initially at least) judged on first impressions – an especially important (although transient) concept in Thin Blue Line.

Furthermore, both films have similar sense of presentation. The camera, on a strictly visual platform, addresses the viewer in an impartial, almost plain manner. Michael Covino defines Morris’ visual stimuli as “self-conscious artificiality - as something apart from the "naturalistic" camera work of most documentaries - that intensifies the general atmosphere of artificiality to such an excruciating degree that one can no longer ignore the artificiality, one becomes conscious of it.” (1980) The subjects themselves, at times, seem to be acting out a specific persona. They are aware of the camera, and their projections of both themselves and their stories come off as akward and self-consciousness. But as the viewers build a relationship with the characters (as one invariably does in both films) such maladroitness metasizes into comfort and we begin to question whether or not these people are simply acting or, as a result of their amateurism, simply rigid because they are uncomfortable with their roles as “filmed subjects.”

There are, however, dramatic and important difference in between the style and intellectual composure of Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven. Gates of Heaven follows closely to the Grierson’s interpretation of documentary film making. Subjects are shot in artistic backgrounds - the opening scene with Floyd McClure comes to mind – but the testimony of the characters themselves reveals a true reflection of their perception on a real incident. Gates of Heaven does not enact any sort of artistic licensing in order to make the film more bold or understandable. The Blue Line, however, deviates from this pattern explicitly by incorporating a substantial amount of re-enactments. In a sense, the use of such methods does blur the line between reality and what the film maker wants the viewers to perceive as reality, but at the same time, Morris’ use of re-enactment allows the viewer a starker, and perhaps more meaningful, picture of what happened. (Ansen 1997) The re-enactments don’t add a sense of sensationalism or “TV Drama” – instead, they work like a map, outlining certain, crucial events in a clearly understandable manner that seems to have more in common with foreign filmmaking than documentary. In itself, the film is listed not as a documentary but as nonfiction film.

Furthermore, the re-enactments in Thin Blue Line allow Morris to surrealistically create an environment that is receptive to Adam’s innocence. Using the observational/expository method of documentary film making, Morris refuses to directly insert his conclusions. He does, however, suggest Adams’ innocence by displaying “key psychological images and sound effects such as the twirling crisis light of a police car, the ‘clicking’ sound of the ever-blinking red and blue light, and the slow-motion flying milkshake released by the partner of the cop being shot.” (Curry 1995) While, as mentioned earlier, the Thin Blue Line is not sensational, it is dramatic. The re-enactments and their juxtaposition with the music (the score is also used when a subject says something particularly “important” to the story) give the film a sort of “fantasy” feel, clearly distinguishing it from the wholly interview driven, traditional documentary form found in Gates of Heaven.

Morris, in Thin Blue Line, furthers his perspective of Adams’ innocence by “demonstrating an interplay of perspectives, both oral and visual, in order to design an overall view of the situation. In other words, Morris documents the situation through a reflexive mode of telling that focuses on the individual plight of Randall Adams while it causes the viewer to reflect upon the machinery of the social justice system operating outside the frame of the film.” (Curry 1995)

The films accost the idea of truth in dramatically different manners. Gates of Heaven is about personal truth, the concepts and thoughts that we, as humans, tell ourselves in order to make life better, worth living, or simply so we can fall asleep at night. Morris does so in a variety of ways but the most striking are the scenes of individuals confronting loss, life, and hope – a woman who tells herself that she will meet her canine companion in heaven, Floyd McClure telling the camera that he cant trust a single human on the same level he can trust his “little dog,” a man that believes that his embarrassing “inspirational speaking” will lead those around him to lead a better life. Simply, the film delves into the spiritual as opposed to the provisional approximation of truth. Thin Blue Line forms a perpendicular with this through Morris’ presentation of a sort of “whodunit” scenario in which truth is both evaluated and presented on a deeply factual basis. “Truth exists for Morris because lies exist; if lies are to be exposed, truths must be strategically deployed against them,” writes Linda Williams in her essay Mirrors Without Memories. “His strategy in the pursuit of this relative, hiearchized, and contingent truth is thus to find guilty those speakers whom he draws most deeply into the explorations of their past.” (Williams 1998, 385) Thin Blue Line must be proactive when considering truth and the stakes are very high – despite its usage of surrealistic and re-enacted scenes, several lives hang in the balance of the “truth” the film seeks to prove. Unlike Gates of Heaven, there are lies to attack and dispel and exactitude to present.

Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line were produced, shot, and released during the heyday of Cinema Verite. As defined by Ellis and McLane, Cinema Verite refers to a “generically non directed filmmaking” that uses naturalistic techniques in combination with the storytelling elements typical of a scripted film. (216) In both films, Morris goes against the grain and smashes Cinema Verite in preference of “slow motion and expressionistic reenactments of different witnesses’ versions of the murder (Thin Blue Line)” and elongated but neutral camera angles that feature people talking straight into the camera while standing beneath a tree or sitting on an upholstered couch (Gates of Heaven). (Williams, 382) Morris, in his depictions, seems to prescribe to Bill Nichols assertion that “the reality effect of a new mode of documentary representation tends to fade away when the conventional nature of this mode of representation becomes increasingly apparent.” (Nichols, 1998) The provocative mannerisms and ultimately ill-fated attempt of the Cinema Verite to create a climate where authentic dialogue, a certain naturalness of action, and a minimal camera arrangement present the real “truth” are rejected by Morris in favor of artistically balanced interviews in which the subject speaks directly into the screen. By rejecting Cinema Verite, Morris enables himself to create films that are both artistically and dramatically engaging (without the usage of any sort of radical or “new” film making techniques) but still have the ability to present a comparatively untempered truth.

From a strictly observational point, the Thin Blue Line is the more sensually engaging of the two movies. Part of this is due to the inclusion of re-enactments but the majority of it comes from Morris’ inclusion of an original score produced by Phillip Glass. Gates of Heaven is totally absent of any musical composition and while such a decision does not harm the movie, it creates a strict parallel with Thin Blue Line regarding how viewers interact with the film. When talking about his choice of Glass as a composer, Morris said “When I was working on The Thin Blue Line I started using various Philip Glass cd's as "scratch" music - various tracks from Mishima, In The Upper Room, Glassworks... Instantly the movie was transformed by the music, into what I had always dreamed it could be a brooding, dark meditation in chance and fate. I was worried. I needed someone to write Philip Glass music... No, I needed Philip Glass.” (Morris, 1988) In The Thin Blue Line, viewers are almost immediately confronted with both a re-enactment and the absorptive music of Glass. Contrast this to the opening scene of Gates of Heaven in which an eccentric old man with an obvious love for pets, Floyd McClure, gives a rambling lecture on why dogs and cats deserve to be memorialized. While both scenes appear to painstakingly molded, there is the sense that the scene in the Thin Blue Line is much more aware of a sort of urgent need to attract the viewer’s attention. Although both films utilize quirky personalities and strange interviewees to drive the story, it is apparent that in the Thin Blue Line, Morris is conscious of the fact that there is a central story, full of protagonists and villains, that is to be told. Gates of Heaven has no clear victim and no clear libertine. Instead, the film is relies upon by the powerful emotional testimony and aforementioned bizarre personalities to impact the viewer.

Thin Blue Line further contrasts Gates of Heaven in terms of emotional involvement. Thin Blue Line appeals to the empirical ideals of justice and right vs. wrong. Adams is innocent and, from the film’s perspective, it is wrong for him to be jailed. It is a story that can be told in terms of black and white – although without Morris directly telling up what to think. Instead, he relies on us, the viewer, to utilize our own social concepts of “justice.” Ellis and McLane, in A New History of Documentary Film, write “The film makes a strong case that prejudice and possibly tainted testimony persuaded the jury to find Adams, a drifter from the Midwest, guilty. The ‘thin blue line’ of police officers separating the public from chaos – as the judge, quoting the D.A. in the case describes them – is shown as ineffective.” (Ellis and McLane 265) Simply, there exists a sense of overall morality in the film. Gates of Heaven, however, is deeply erudite and shies away from any sort of ascertainment. Shortly into the film, an aging, lonely woman who has just buried her dog – and what appears to be her best friend – states wearily, almost pathetically; “There's your dog; your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn't it?" It’s a deeply philosophical and painful question: how does the human mind conceptualize, cope, and react to death? Covino, in his 1980 Film Quarterly review of the film, wrote “The film replaces the usual tension of documentaries with a new kind of tension: there's no Marcel Ophuls holding up a microphone to French collaborators and ex-Nazis. No one's trying to evade anything. That's what's so depressing: it's the other way around. These very ordinary people are so innocent, so anxious, so eager to express themselves, to explain their "philosophies of life," A husband and a wife seem to discover in front of the camera that they have different theological notions with regards to the hereafter - the woman, at any rate, feels confident she will be reunited in heaven with her dead pet.” (1980) In Gates of Heaven, Morris creates a story out of reflective, if not overly sapient, musings by quotidian people with quotidian lives. Viewers are compelled by its emotional value, moved by flirtingly satirical yet deeply human reactions and observations made by the documented subjects. It details life between the margins, the painful but, in our approximation, unimportant. Thin Blue Line is precisely the opposite – its story drives, creates, and yearns for philosophical legal thought. It questions the “thin blue line,” the judicial system, and the idea of prejudice. Both films engage the viewer in a cognitive manner but their methodologies – the roads they take to their destination – differ greatly.

At its core, Gates of Heaven is indelicate and somewhat brusque. Viewers ask themselves “Why are these people, these fools, so sad, so depressed, so hopeless over the death of their pet.” But perhaps that’s the point. We all mourn over what others may perceive as trivialities, the trite and temporarily painful events of daily life that gradually fade into reservoir of our memory. At times, Gates of Heaven comes dangerously close to ridicule only to be rescued by a moment of unscripted and poignant monument. “The film lacks the usual shock absorbers. Despite its rigor, despite its formalism, despite its posing, despite its artificiality, despite all these things, Gates of Heaven overwhelms the viewer with the sheer, incredible horror of life as it often is in the quietest, most everyday moments,” writes Covino. “But it's affecting, vivid, and the viewer suddenly finds himself - but with much preparation - in the presence of a pain, a sorrow, so naked and so powerful that all the film's artifice drops away.” (1988) There is no pragmatism is Gates of Heaven, no problem to be solved, and (obviously) no answers provided. The viewer quickly discards the unimportance of the film’s fleeting plot and recognizes that first and foremost, Gates of Heaven provides an opportunistic window into the sense of disconsolateness that hides in the shadows of our emotional equilibriums. It’s not about pet cemeteries, old men with emigrating sagacity, or the ridiculousness of pet headstones that state “God is Dog spelled backwards.” Instead, Gates of Heaven confronts the sting of loss and the uncertainty of death and leaves us to question what, really, this movie is all about.

Perhaps the most striking difference in the films is the way that they end. Thin Blue Line’s makes an effective case for Adams innocence. “Is Randall Adams an innocent man?,” Morris asks Harris. In a cold, haunting voice, the young man replies: “I’m sure he is.” “How do you know, asks Morris. “Because I’m the one that knows,’ replies Harris. As the film fades to black, viewers are left shaken but sure of whom the real killer is. It’s a powerful and inhospitable moment and its gravity is enormous. This was not, as several Judicial and Police Officers suggest through the film, much ado about nothing. It was much ado about SOMETHING. It is at this point that Thin Blue Line is at its most human, the exact moment when the viewer realizes that this is not about a murder but instead, shattered lives and broken hope. Gates of Heaven ends in a dramatically different fashion; its last shot is an unobstructed aerial shot of the cemetery. There are no people, no pets, and no sound. Just a comfortless shot of green countryside that holds for 30 seconds before distressingly blinking out. The ending catches the viewer by surprise. It is delicate, moving, and agonizingly final. One could imagine that is what death would feel like - painlessly and silently floating above a world, our world, of grass and trees. While both endings leave the viewer rustically uncomfortable, the end of Thin Blue Line tells us what the film was about and why it was important while the ending of Gates of Heaven leaves us questioning what the film was really about. Or, what is this life really about. ending is doggedly haunting, arid of emotion and compassion. It’s evil and uncompromisingly so. It is comprised of a simple shot of a handheld voice recorder on a plain, wood-grained table. The viewer does not see anyone, they merely hear two voices engaged in an interview. It’s also the only time the viewers hear Morris’ voice in the film. Morris is questioning Harris, the man the film clearly suggests is guilty, about

Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line are very different films created by the same man. They both, however, engage the viewer in an importantly cognitive manner. These films are what documentary should strive to be: potent, meditative, and visually stimulating. In a phrase, these films are simply and fully exhausting. Morris has the unique ability to be both fatherly and neighborly. We, as the viewer, feel like we learned something over the course of his films but without Morris shoving anything down our throats. It’s beautifully tactful. Morris transforms a simple film into a dynamic journey - something that feels so real that we are left with tangible memories. In some ways, both films feel like a long, cross country journey without a map. Instead, there is only the hope of a destination – somewhere, anywhere – that is beautiful, invaluable, and wholly remunerative. Morris begs the viewer to not only walk into the wild but to also find his way out again. Hopefully, we’ll come out enlightened but if we don’t, it was still a hell of an expedition.