Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Eva Bizovská The Voice of Crime Documentaries Paradise Lost (1996) and The Thin Blue Line (1988) Bachelor's Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. 2018 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Eva Bizovska Acknowledgement I would like to thank all who gave me much needed support to finish this thesis - my family and friends, and to Mgr. Stefan Veleski, B.A. for his advice in bachelor seminars. Last but not least, I thank to doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. for believing in my topic and laying the crucial foundations of this thesis. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. The Documentary Genre 4 1.1. The Crime Documentaries 6 1.1.1 The Paradise Lost Series 7 1.1.2 The Thin Blue Line 9 2. Voice - Theory and Methodology 11 3. Case Studies and Seeming Objectivity 13 3.1. Paradise Lost: Guilt by Association 15 3.1.1. Sentiment and Authenticity 17 3.1.2. The Authentic Footage 19 3.2. The Thin Blue Line: "Heard of the proverbial scapegoat? " 21 3.2.1. Word against Word 23 3.2.2. Manipulated Reenactments 26 Conclusion 27 Works Cited 30 Summary 33 Resumé 34 Introduction Every film communicates with the viewer through narration and style. The combination of both transforms the reality into something poetical. This is mostly the domain of the fiction films that do not necessarily aspire to influence the viewers. They rather evoke emotions than an influence in the viewers. On the opposite side, the non- fiction films allow more for the viewers' influence. The reason for that is a dominant presence of reality. There is a constant focus on the viewer because they themselves are aware of the reality. So, the documentarists work not only with narration and style in the process of making, but also with the approach towards depicted reality. Regardless of filmmakers' motivations, the approach they choose towards reality is visible in a final essence of the film - the essence called voice. The voice of the documentary was defined by an American film critic and theoretician Bill Nichols. The documentary's voice is captured not just in the aftermath. The voice is shown throughout the entire projection of the film. Nichols' work elaborates on the qualities of the voice, such as style or arrangement observable in editing or in the compositions of the scenes, the presentation of the protagonists and more. These are the choices of the filmmakers' that define many approaches towards the depiction of reality in documentaries. This bachelor thesis analyzes two documentaries that differ in approach toward the reality but agree with the voice. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and The Thin Blue Line portray two different crime stories that took place in the late 20th century in the United States. The documentaries are about the investigation of the murders where the killer is unknown. The creators of both introduce the crimes through the camera in their own specific way. One uses authenticity as a key notion, while the other does the exact opposite by playing with the dramatic reenactments. Yet both are 1 similar in three features: influence (saved life of the protagonist), manipulation of the viewer (through manifestation of that innocence) and self-reflexivity (active participation of filmmakers on investigation). Three features that together create the voice of these documentaries. These features, altogether, form the logic and the structure of both documentaries visible in the voice. Both films give rise to the release of main protagonists who were sentenced to life imprisonment. Paradise Lost (referred to as PL) gained such media popularity and the huge interest among some individuals that enough money was raised to finance a further investigation. Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (referred to as the TBL) recorded the statement from a criminal during the interview that proves the innocence of another falsely convicted man. The voice of PL and the TBL influenced the start of the research for this thesis similarly as it influenced many people globally. The production team of Paradise Lost represents HBO Channel. Court in Arkansas trusted the HBO team in making a documentary that depicts the horror of satanic sacrifices of children. The police believed that this will help to discredit three teenage suspects and possibly to gain some praise for their investigative work (Kors). However, right from the begging the director Joe Berlinger and the camera man Bruce Sinofsky wanted to stay objective rather than point fingers at someone. The center of the creative team in The Thin Blue Line is the director Errol Morris. His work as an investigative journalist resulted into the documentary worth the life of a falsely convicted man for the murder of the Dallas police officer. Morris' depiction of the reality does not leave much space to the imagination - the reenactments of the crime scene or testimonies are that imagination. He looks at this film as a case and he investigates its each evidence or testimony as a potential truth, leaving the viewer puzzled the whole 2 time. However, Morris knows his truth and he intends to reveal it at a right time to everyone. The documentaries did not discover the killer but they made the judiciary system free the falsely convicted men imprisoned for years. Two seemingly different films from diverse time periods saved lives because new evidences were found due to their makings. Paradise Lost and The Thin Blue Line are characterized by their objective style in filmmaking which leads to the very subjective results, by Errol on purpose, by Berlinger and Sinofsky accidentally. The main goal of my thesis is to analyze these crime documentaries through their voice, as defined by a scholar Bill Nichols, that forms itself from the logic and structure specific for each documentary. The voice uncovers the narrative of seeming objectivity through the conscious and unconscious choices of the filmmakers and sees it as illusory because of the features - influence, manipulation and self-reflexivity - projected into the voice. Furthermore, the thesis' aim is to prove these three features specifically for each documentary through examples from the texts of the films. In the following chapter, I introduce the problematic of the documentary genre in general and briefly describe the crimes depicted in each film. The second chapter provides a closer look on the voice and explains its logic used for this research. The main analysis is described in the third chapter giving detailed information on the plot of both documentaries and then showing the particular components of the voice starting with Paradise Lost and then The Thin Blue Line. In the chapter, I also prove the seeming objectivity that is of a specific nature in both films and it is visible in the qualities of their voice. 3 1. The Documentary Genre The documentarists create on the basis of the real events to make a unique version of known truth. Even though the influence of the viewer is not their primary intention, the feature is constantly present in each phase of the documentary filmmaking. Documentary films are hard to define for the scholars even today. There are many variations of these definitions but the carried meaning usually remains: Documentary films ... are part or parcel of the discursive formations, the language genres, and rhetorical stratagems by and through which pleasure and power, ideologies and Utopias, subjects and subjectivities receive tangible representation. (Nichols, Representing Reality 10) The definition of documentaries is formed in the contrast with the limitations or the similarities of fiction films. So, the certain is that the documentary films belong to the category of non- fictional films. However, the line between the fiction and non-fiction gets thinner as new documentaries originate every year. Bill Nichols, as Professor of Cinema at San Francisco state University, very thoroughly explores many varieties of documentary genre in his book Introduction to Documentary. The author compares documentaries with fiction films and searches for the uneasy definition of this genre. The book explores its potential and limitations. The defined voice then represents the solution of the documentary films and it elaborates on its characteristics and qualities. Still, Nichols suggests that all films are documentaries separated in two categories - documentaries of wish-fulfillment and documentaries of social representation (1). The first category embodies everyone's dreams and fears; it depicts the imagination. This could be the category of fiction films. The second one is about documentaries as a generally accepted non-fictional medium. With this differentiation of films, the author 4 acknowledges that behind every film is a group of filmmakers whose decisions alter the reality. Whether it is a fiction shot in the courtroom with real actors or a documentary about the real case shot during the actual trial, there are still makings of a person behind the total outcome of the footage. Even when there are depicted real personas and there is as minimum manipulation of a camera and a scene as possible, there are still choices made by director that reshape the reality. According to Nichols "documentary claims to address the historical world and to possess the capacity to intervene by shaping how we regard it" (39). In other words, documentary captures some periodical fragments of the time and presents itself in a certain structure that aims at the viewer. This proves that the intervention of the documentary author is always present but it becomes more visible after the release when its voice is finally captured.

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