Under Penalty of Death: reveries of justice in Morris and Kieślowski

ABSTRACT

Under Penalty of Death: reveries of justice in Morris and Kieślowski – The text analyzes the figural aspects of The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988) and A Short Film About Killing (Kieślowski, 1988) as reveries of justice driven by the abolitionist imagination of the death penalty. This imagination finds its power in the inviolability of human life as a sense of justice experienced through poetic treatments of the death penalty as a visual motif. The films are approached via a theoretical dialogue between Bachelard’s concept of poetic reverie and Dubois’ Figural question, as they allow us to investigate fiction and documentary as filmic reveries that lead us to a poetic and political experience with the phenomenological world of justice.

Keywords:
Poetic Reverie; Figural Analysis; Visual Motif; Political Imagination; Effect of Presence

RESUMO

Sob Pena de Morte: devaneios da justiça em Morris e Kieślowski – O texto faz a análise figural de A Tênue Linha da Morte (Morris, 1988) e Não Matarás (Kieślowski, 1988) como devaneios da justiça impulsionados pela imaginação abolicionista da pena de morte. Essa imaginação tem sua potência na inviolabilidade da vida humana como senso de justiça experimentado nos tratamentos poéticos dados à pena de morte como motivo visual. Os filmes são abordados em um diálogo teórico proposto entre o conceito de devaneio poético, de Bachelard, e a questão do Figural, de Dubois, porque permitem investigar a ficção e o documentário como devaneios fílmicos que conduzem a uma experiência poética e política com o mundo fenomenológico da justiça.

Palavras-chave:
Devaneio Poético; Análise Figural; Motivo Visual; Imaginação Política; Efeito de Presença

RESUMÉ

Sous Peine de Mort: rêveries de justice chez Morris et Kieślowski – Ce texte présente une analyse figurale du Dossier Adams (Morris, 1988) et de Tu Ne Tueras Point (Kieślowski, 1988) comme des rêveries de justice entraînées par l’imagination abolitionniste de la peine de mort. La puissance de cette imagination réside dans l’inviolabilité de la vie humaine comme un sens de justice éprouvé dans les traitements poétiques accordés à la peine de mort en tant que motif visuel. Par un dialogue théorique entre la rêverie poétique de Bachelard et la question du figural de Dubois, nous explorons la fiction et le documentaire comme des rêveries filmiques qui conduisent à une expérience poétique et politique du monde phénoménologique de la justice.

Mots-clés:
Rêverie Poétique; Analyse Figurale; Motif Visuel; Imagination Politique; Effets de Présence

Phenomenology should be learned from reverie (Gastón Bachelard, 2009, p. 14).

In a nutshell, it’s about finding out how a film invents a figurative logic (Nicole Brenez, 1998).

Abolition of the death penalty as filmic reveries

The Thin Blue Line, 1988, by Errol Morris, and A Short Film About Killing (Krótki Film o Zabijaniu, 1988), by Krzysztof Kieślowski, are films that condense on a poetic level the imagination relating to a major artistic theme of political modernity: the abolition of the death penalty¹. Both films have been widely studied in the theory and history of cinema, particularly when we consider Morris’s tradition of reality in documentary and his inventive forays into the fictional or, with Kieślowski, the documentary approach of his descriptive political fictions of everyday life.

However, until now, they have not been examined by looking at the reveries of justice created by the impulses of the death penalty abolitionist imagination, as understood in their poetic emanations, or “effects of presence” (Gumbrecht, 2010, p. 40). What we intend to study in The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing is how the impulses of the death penalty abolitionist imagination trigger “poetic reveries” that lead to the world of justice; not the world of judicial administration, but that of justice as a phenomenal field, more specifically as a category of political experience with the just. In this way, the films critically intervene in the perception of justice from a poetic perspective:

The reverie we want to study is poetic reverie, a reverie that poetry puts on the right track, the one that a growing consciousness can follow. This reverie is a reverie that is written down, or at least promised to be written down. [...] Then the images are composed and ordered. [...] It is these impulses of imagination that the phenomenologist of the imagination must try to revive [...] And it is precisely through phenomenology that the distinction between dreaming and reverie can be clarified, because the intervention of consciousness in reverie bears a decisive sign (Bachelard, 2009, p. 6; 11).

The reveries that they want to relive are those that are filmed or that they want to film, driven by the abolitionist imagination of the death penalty.² It is worth remembering Bachelard’s warning (2009, p. 162): “[...] if we eliminate from our research the literary works that are inspired by nightmares, we will close off perspectives aimed at human destiny and, at the same time, we will deprive ourselves of the literary splendor of the apocalyptic worlds”.

In this sense, the filmic reveries of Morris and Kieślowski, as well as being poetic, are political because they carry with them the “decisive sign” of the conscious intervention of directors inclined towards the abolition of the death penalty, understood as the becoming of humanity’s civilizational and moral progress. The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing pose the problem of reveries of justice that have found their substance, their own impulse, their unique poetics: the inviolability of human life as a figurable reverie, a potential imagination, which can be embodied in the visual motif of the death penalty, becoming susceptible to description less through narrative operations and more through the plastic sensations experienced as a sense of justice.

From this perspective, it is unnecessary or even impertinent to draw theoretical distinctions or describe the poetic nuances of fiction or documentary inscribed in the films. We are not trying to approach them from a liminal, hybrid or frontier position, as is usually done. What is important is that the meeting of the works brings together a unity of imagination common to cinema, whose figural capacities show the appearance of fiction and documentary, indistinctly, as filmic reveries converging on the political values of abolitionism, even though the films differ in the poetic treatments given to the visual motif of the death penalty (Figure 1).

Figure 1
The electric chair and the noose as visual motifs: impulses to the abolitionist imagination.

Approaching The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing as reveries of justice allows us to make a double movement, both theoreticalmethodological and analytical. The concept of “poetic reverie” defined by Bachelard (2009), among other aspects, as a phenomenology of the creative imagination, interested in the origin of poetic images, is presented here as a triggering element of the imagination associated with the “question of the figural” in cinema as per Dubois (2012, p. 108-109).

For the author, the figural is a process that takes place in and through the image, “[...] something that is unstable, always in a state of becoming, that proceeds from a logic of the visual as an act, and something that comes from within the image itself, which is always at work in the very body of the image, in the living flesh of its visuality” (Dubois, 2012, p. 108-109). At the point where something “comes from within the image”, there is a conjunction between poetic reverie and the figural, because what comes from within refers to its own origin as poetic imagination. By analogy, poetic reverie and the figural are always in the process of becoming. But what makes something emerge from within the image, what radiates from its origin?

In Bachelard, this dynamic is described as impulses to the imagination or forces that lend coherence to apparent poetic images; in Dubois, the process is reported as figural forces or forces intrinsic to the appearance of image events. It is possible to see in these impulses of forces that poetic reveries and the figural come from imaginative powers, and activate the becoming of some artistic motif, for example, literary or visual. As such, the “intervention of consciousness in reverie”, in Bachelard (2009, p. 6; 11), or the “filmic staging in specific forms”, in Dubois, carry with them traces of intuitions, choices and plastic intentions applied to a work. In theoreticalmethodological terms, the marks of appearance of poetic reverie (the impulse of origin) and the figural (the presence-figuration) inscribed in The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing present themselves as a question for “comparative cinema” (Souto, 2019). They are filmic reveries, therefore, which are reinforced after the consummation of the experience that is had with them.

When two unique images by two poets who have separate reveries meet, they seem to reinforce each other. This convergence of two exceptional images somehow offers a verification of facts for phenomenological study. The image loses its gratuitousness. The free play of the imagination is no longer anarchy (Bachelard, 2000, p. 235).

In terms of analysis, the impulses of the imagination contemplated by Bachelard in poetic reveries signal correspondences with what Dubois (2012) calls the principle of the initial eventuality of the figural, which generates the event of the image. But there is a noticeable distinction. It’s as if one wanted to relive, in the phenomenologist’s task, the original impulses of the poetic image, and the other wanted to glimpse the symptomatic results in the “perceptive consciousness”, in the astonishment of the detail of the image that sparks a figurative memory, activating it. According to Dubois (2012), the moment after this activation is the starting point for interpreting the experience, extracting its structures of meaning, as if in a montage. The point of analyzing The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing is to fold both ends over each other, those of the impulses of poetic imagination and the figural as an event of the image. To put it simply, one could think of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) as the imagination of the fear of the wild, the dread of the depths from which the film originates, and whose lines of force drive the figural to take on that form. In more general terms, when you watch a movie with landscapes of pastures, cattle, fences and streams, you have an imagination of the picturesque. The picturesque is a nursery of images. And if you watch a movie of the sea, with its violent waves crashing into large rocks, you could be looking at an imagination of the sublime, which has been given this form, but alternatively, you could be looking at footage of large glaciers or an extensive landscape of dunes in the desert, which would also be imaginations of the sublime.

In this sense, the question is to observe the triggering image, the imagination itself, which mobilized those forms in their figurable reveries. Here, justice is a nursery of images, of reveries driven by a sense of the just, the inviolability of human life, installed in a specific visual motif, the death penalty, linked to the political and moral postulates of its abolition. To carry out a figural analysis of The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing means going beyond the impulses of the imagination, which shine through the details in the images, and moving from the moment of experience to the time of interpretation. It is necessary to construct the system in which the films, understood as events of images, reveal the symptoms³.

The inviolability of human life as figurable reverie

The encounter between these unique works by Morris and Kieślowski reveals that the free imaginative play around the visual motif of the death penalty is not anarchy. This is because the figural power it unleashes has a poetic intent that is inseparable from a sense of abolitionist justice: the inviolability of human life as a figurable principle that drives the reveries and governs the motif. Filmic invention makes speculative thoughts about the extinction of capital punishment incarnate in the works.

In The Thin Blue Line, Randall Adams is sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman while wandering the streets of Dallas at night with David Harris, a juvenile delinquent he meets by chance hours before the crime, and who is the real murderer that falsely incriminates him. In A Short Film About Killing, a chance encounter also marks the fate of Jacek Lazar, a teenage offender who wanders aimlessly through the streets of Warsaw until he randomly and brutally murders a taxi driver and is sentenced to death for it.

The visual motif of the death penalty makes Morris and Kieślowski poetically muse on the crime, the courtroom, the personal dramas of the condemned and the execution rituals, driven by cinema’s ability to figuratively speculate on the justice, morality and ethicality of legal murder committed by the State in the face of the inviolability of the right to life (Figure 2). The directors plastically consider the moral and political objections to the death penalty, situating abolitionist thinking as a figural problem, whose key to understanding requires a phenomenology of the political imagination in the films (Filho, 2023, p. 110).

Figure 2
Randall Adams, David Harris and Jacek Lazar: sentenced to death.

The murder sequences initially offer some “operations of figural detail” that are necessary in order to scrutinize (Dubois, 2012, p. 113-114), in the material of the films, how the gestures of inventing images contain figurative logics that correspond to acts of sensitive criticism of the death penalty. The processes of the figural and the political become inseparable, because the abolitionist imagination, nourished by the principle of the inviolability of the right to life, does not refer to materialized, figurative images, but rather to the first image that potentiated what is visible in the films.

It is in this sense that the murder sequences postulate the phenomenal presence of that sense of justice being reverie in the singular poetics of each director (Figure 3). Morris shows the murderer in the shadows, hidden in the mystery of Randall Adams, an innocent man who was sentenced to the electric chair. The play of light and shadow in the investigative reenactment of the crime heightens the drama of solving the enigma, enveloped in an atmosphere of abolitionist affections that presage the irreversibility of the death penalty: the risk of the irreparable miscarriage of justice. Kieślowski shows Jacek Lazar’s homicidal intent when he treacherously stares at the taxi driver through the rear-view mirror. The composition of the shot accentuates the murderer’s gaze, framed by the victim’s own subjective camera, molding, in the image imagined by this reverie, another abolitionist affectivity: should you really kill the person who has killed?

Figure 3
Fiction and documentary: one figural nature.

In both cases, the figural is not isolated in the figure itself, but in the web of reveries that leads the figure to show itself the way it does. “Processus always in becoming, the figural is therefore an event of the image” (Dubois, 2012, p. 113). But it’s important to add: an event of both the fictional and documentary image.

Observing the triggering image, that is, the abolitionist imagination of the death penalty itself, which daydreamed in those forms sensing the inviolability of the right to life as a figurable principle, also makes us realize the webs of relationships that lead fiction and documentary to reveal themselves, ontologically, the way they do: in the zero degree of the same figural nature (Figure 3).

The suspicious driver sees Jacek Lazar peering at him through the rearview mirror, they see each other as fiction and documentary in perpetual becoming in the history of cinema. Contemplated together, the shots position The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing in “translation” (Brenez, 1998). One sees and gravitates around the gaze of the other so that, beyond the visual motif of the death penalty, the encounter provided by the films produces the phenomenological appearance of the fictional and the documentary, combined, towards the verification of the figural in cinema, in itself. The mirroring of those shots pairs a circuit of exchange, creating a point of indiscernibility between the two films and, moreover, between the notions of fiction and documentary at a higher level of analysis, that of filmic reveries, crystallizing them in “mutual images”, in the sense of “two mirrors facing each other” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 89-91).

From this comparativist perspective, “[...] to look at the figural in a film is also, in a way, to look at cinema seeing” (Dubois, 2012, p. 109). The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing show fiction and documentary as amplitudes of the same cinematographic figural spectrum creating poetic effects. These gradients are examined in detail by Comolli (2010, p. 295-297) when he treats the deviations of direct cinema and its degrees of integration with fiction as games of inversions between documentary and fictional effects, even though the author does not explicitly theorize the “figural”. In this sense, to “look at cinema seeing” means to perceive how the abolitionist imagination drives the reveries of directors who move in the amplitudes of the cinematographic figural and invent figurative logics that sensitively criticize the principle of the death penalty itself as a legal exception to the universal right to life.

It is important to note that these figurative logics are ordered around the plasticity of blood crimes (Figure 4). Morris documents the evidence of the photos and forensic reports of a completed murder, the factualness of the huge pool of blood on the road and the face of the dead policeman. Kieślowski fictionalizes a murder in the act: the murderer can’t bear to look at the taxi driver’s bloodied face and covers it in order to finish him off. In the filmic reveries, the fake or real blood suggests that “[...] it is the function of the document for the fiction and that of the fiction for the document that must be studied, how they evoke, produce each other, how they resonate and clash in the double dimension – lying and truthful of the film” (Comolli, 2010, p. 310).

Figure 4
The plasticity of the blood crimes shapes the perception of the death penalty.

However, from the perspective of filmic reveries, the question of the function of the document for fiction can be rethought in the moments of rupture and unity of the figural, because it is at these moments that the political imagination surrounding the abolition of the death penalty becomes poetically manifest as sensitive criticism. As Ostrower (1998, p. 73) states, “perceiving is synonymous with understanding”.

The plastic of the blood crimes: reverie, rupture and unity of the figural

But if the document-fiction function (and vice versa) is examined in the plasticity of the blood crimes set in translational movement with each other, one can see the power of the vision of spilled blood, of human life taken, as the imagined image of a moral injury: Cain killed Abel. We can see the power of figural – and not functional – expansion of a detail, the blood, true or false, which is a source of reveries of justice, a point of intensity of matter, color and forms, open to the work of problematizing the death legally inflicted on a person convicted of murder as a universally repudiable category of injustice.

This perception of injustice is experienced in the strategies of figurability that bring about disruption of figuration through the figural in The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing. Dubois (2012, p. 111-112) describes two of them: the “effect of alteration”, when the figural “attacks the good form, affects the certainties of the figurative, proceeds through a work of disfigurement”, and the “effect of alterity”, which “does not attack a form of legibility”, but invents a new one in a work of “dissimilarity” which, becoming radicalized, becomes non-figurative, experimental or abstract.

Morris’s filmic reverie is that of disfiguring the most traditional conventions of documentary by using the poetics of film noir, ironizing the practices of direct cinema, because, as he argues, “access to the truth is not guaranteed by a style”, but by the incessant work of searching for it by thinking about forms (Morris; Bates, 1989). Kieślowski’s filmic reverie dismantles realistic fiction at the edges of the frame by applying colored filters (greenish, yellowish) that blur mimetic fidelity and give the image expressionist tones, obscuring the moral world of the characters. But he doesn’t lose the reference points of the figurative, preserving at the center of the composition the documentary observation of disenchanted individuals in everyday life, dismantled at the edges.

It is the values of film noir or the “detective genre” (Resha, 2015), as well as the values of a poetics of social dissolution, that offer the figurative logics that modulate the sensitive criticism of the death penalty in and through the plasticity of blood crimes, revealing, through disfigurement and dissimilarity, the reveries driven by the inviolability of human life as a sense of abolitionist justice (Figure 5).

Figure 5
In the ruptures of the figural, criticism of the death penalty due to disfiguration and dissimilarity.

The opening sequence of The Thin Blue Line begins the work of disfiguring the conventions of the documentary genre by evoking film noir. The shots of the city of Dallas set the urban atmosphere, the nocturnal environment conducive to blood crime, under the suspenseful score composed by Philip Glass. Condemned to death, Randall Adams narrates his story in voice-over and to camera and recalls, in retrospect, the events that entangled him in a fatalistic fate, in the figure of the Hitchcockian “wrong man”, unjustly trapped by circumstances he didn’t create and from which he can’t escape, not least because he has in the actual murderer, David Harris, his key prosecution witness. “Why did I meet the boy? I don’t know. Why did I run out of gas at that moment? I don’t know. But it happened,” says Randall Adams as he recalls his chance meeting with that young offender.

Morris muses on what happened on the night of the murder, based on contradictory evidence and dubious testimonies. He studies the crime as an empirical succession of facts that generate clues, whose ambiguities open up, beyond the case itself, to a poetic investigation of the legibility of the documentary in its capacity for objectivity and truth. In the plasticity of spilled blood, the detective-director attacks the good form of the documentary, disfiguring its most conventional figurative certainties.

Initially, there is the “first root of the direct” (Comolli, 2010, p. 295), the simple “interview fragment”, the filmic-sounding document generated by a private detective involving convicts, police officers, lawyers, prosecutors or witnesses. These interviews are conducted with the characters in their usual living spaces, such as the prison, the police station, their home, their office, and they are all framed in the same pattern of medium closeups. As the testimonies support the confrontation between the accused, accusers and defenders, the shots are stable, without camera manipulation (such as dramatic zooms or unusual angles), and the compositions in the background of the characters are visually trivial, such as doors, windows, walls and so on.

The chimerical soundtrack by Philip Glass, the film’s main narrator, sets up the paradox of the direct and expands the fictional gradient in the figural spectrum, circulating the words of the testimonies associated with graphic and archival materials, such as police lights, gun sights, street maps, urban shots, forensic reports, family photos, newspaper clippings and reenactments. In fact, the contradictions in the testimonies grow in line with the visual materials, and the force of the figural expansion of the spilled blood leads Morris to the crime re-enactments, plunging him ever deeper into the ambiguities of the real case – a policeman was in fact shot dead. He treats the contradictions of testimony and evidence as poetic ruptures open to the exercise of abstraction, to the production of knowledge. This is done by re-enacting the crime through repetition, from different perspectives and in a highly stylized way, mixing the use of the fixed observational camera (different types of shots) with the quality of film noir lighting and slow motion as well as amplified sound effects (of gunshots, shoe stomps).

By attacking the good form of documentary, Morris undoes its figurative certainties and returns, countless times, to the moment of the shooting in order to consider and rethink the evidence. In this way, he unravels the plot of perjury and disrespect for the procedural guarantees of the rule of law that resulted in an innocent man being sentenced to the electric chair due to the cynicism of his accusers and false witnesses.

In A Short Film About Killing, Kieślowski ponders the abolition of the death penalty by imagining three characters whose paths cross in a crime of blood. Jacek Lazar roams the streets committing crimes. The taxi driver has a misanthropic attitude towards others. The lawyer professes his humanism in the final university exam, which authorizes him to practice his profession. These character types are described by the successive actions of the characters until Jacek Lazar kills the taxi driver and, under trial, is defended by the lawyer.

However, what is important is to dilute these considerations about the content of the actions that characterize the characters’ dispositions in the appearances of the shots, because it is in the sensory experience of the visual and acoustic proposal of the film that one senses the moral and political repugnance towards the death penalty. The work of “dissimilarity” from realist fiction undertaken in the shots strays far enough from the mimetic realm to tarnish the frames at their edges, like blood stains, the effect of the application of green and yellow filters that obscure the edges of the scenes, making them lugubrious.

However, at the same time, the observational gaze that describes in parallel the melancholy life of the characters in the city of Warsaw remains at the heart of the frame and camera movements. The strategy of dissimilarity tarnishes the realistic fiction, whose images are coagulated with blood from the very first shots. The poetic irradiation of the moral shock of a murder is foreshadowed from moment to moment: children hang a cat out of spite, Jacek Lazar strangles the taxi driver for no reason and then he himself is legally executed by hanging. But it is the dark quality of the shots that gives scope to the imagination about the nature of those human and social relationships – the form arranges the contents in a pictorial and sound dimension.

The dissimilarity of realist fiction at the edges of the shot, fed by a documentary gaze, captures the inner worlds of the characters in their taciturn states, along with the world of the surrounding society, under which capital punishment hovers as a sign of civilizational barbarism. The plasticity of the blood crime modulated in this way integrates different levels of speculation about human nature and the nature of the State into the same visual field.

Kieślowski modulates the perception of the death penalty’s immorality by the prolonged and detailed description of the brutal murder committed by Jacek Lazar, because the graphic violence of this sequence serves as a visual comparison with the extended and detailed staging of his hanging by the State, figuring that a legal and bureaucratic murder is an act of cruelty greater or even worse than the actual blood crime to be punished.

Without claiming to analyze both sequences in all their aspects, both in the case of the common crime and in the case of the judicial execution, the psychic tension that prevails is sustained by specific forms of staging that offer an observational and close-up view of the deaths and, at the same time, arrange in the composition itself the desire not to look, to distance oneself morally from them.

The murder scene, which lasts around seven minutes, transcribes Jacek Lazar’s attack on the taxi driver in every detail, as well as the physical clashes between them. However, the frames in which the murderer hesitates and looks away stand out because, in some way, he is attacking his own humanity. The hanging scene, which lasts five minutes, describes the details of an execution: the bureaucrat checks the ambient conditions, puts oil on the pulleys to ensure the rope fits around the condemned man’s neck and tests the gallows. The shots that catch the eye are also those in which the guards, faced with the imminence of having to carry out the sentence, do it as quickly as possible because it is unbearable and turn their backs or look away from what they have to do and which, in some way, betrays their moral conscience.

In addition to the effects of the rupture of the figural, it is also essential to observe the unity of imagination common to filmic reveries. The plasticity of blood crimes takes into its figural domain what it decides to put in the frame, because these creative choices presuppose the postulates of its specific poetics, its imaginative motivations. The frames composed by the camera work in the sequences of murders staged in cars reveal both the unity and the rupture of figuration produced by the figural. They show the birth of those images as cinematic images that question the murders and, beyond them, expand the imagining of the abolition of the death penalty as a categorical punishment for those crimes.

On the one hand, this unity of imagination common to cinema is considered here in the sense that the work of imagining, or generating images, “is a specific thinking about a concrete doing”; on the other hand, the imaginative ruptures create singular poetics that present the analyst with the challenge of “imagining the imagining, imagine the specific forms in which one imagines” (Ostrower, 2021, p. 35-38). As such, knowing that the order of the figural and the figurative are unthinkable without each other, the description of the moments of figuration unity allows us to look at the filmic reveries by contiguity, because they hint at similar visual solutions in the sequences of bloodshed (Figure 6).

Figure 6
The unity of the figuration produced by the figural in the murder scenes.

In this sense, Morris and Kieślowski have to resolve a common problem: to stage the murders by studying the imaginative paths outlined by the fields of vision created by the spaces inside and outside the cars. This requires mobilizing graphic elements such as wheels, mirrors and accelerator pedals. The directors’ craft is full of reveries. In one case, the crime of blood is a matter of fact re-enacted on the basis of documents; in the other, it is complete invention. Faced with a concrete case, they conjecture, examine possibilities, link automotive graphic attributes to camera angles, intuitively opt for certain details and exclude others, and in so doing shape the ideas of death and blood and intensify the rhythm of suspense with visions of fear. The close-ups applied to the furtive gestures of the homicidal hands bring out the moral damage hidden inside the cars – the intention of a fatal shot, an atrocious strangulation.

Morris and Kieślowski explore similar visual solutions in some shots and, even though they fulfill different dramatic functions in the editing of both sequences, it is significant to see in these pictures how The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing move in the amplitudes of language until they touch a point where the figural and the figurative are imaginatively unified in common graphic compositions to stage the crimes of blood.

The wide shots spatialize the cars in deserted places, emphasizing the inevitable expectation of the murders. Under the cars, you can see the feet of the policeman who will be shot and those of the young man who will attack the taxi driver. Death is sensed from the windows and rear-view mirrors. The tires skid as the killer speeds away after shooting the policeman, and the taxi driver involuntarily steps on the pedal because he is being strangled. The moral damage is established in the close-up and the American shot that tarnish the hands of the killers by the use of the revolver that will shoot the policeman and the huge stone that will hit the taxi driver’s head. The bloodshed is consummated with the two bodies lying on the ground.

The reveries of justice and the pregnancies of sensitive criticism of the death penalty

The relationships of unity and rupture of the figural created by the filmic reveries produce results that are as similar as they are different. The two sequences reveal ways of looking that are situationally inscribed in the common problem of staging blood crimes in cars. As different as they are, they feature these shimmering moments in which the graphic tendencies of some shots seem to obey the visual delineations of the same field of forces exerted on the figural not only by the filming location, but also by the moral damage presupposed in the staging of the act of killing.

Also in these sequences, the figural invested with homicidal moral injury intensifies the detail of the shots of the milkshake glass and the taxi driver’s dentures, concentrating in them all the imaginative power of the sensitive criticism of the death penalty as a reverie of justice (Figure 7). The reveries surrounding the inviolability of the right to life are manifested in these compositions with layers of mystery, terror and suffering that produce, from the point of view of figurative logic, an intense visual prevalence that shapes the abolitionist imagination experienced as a sense of justice that criticizes capital punishment not because of its uselessness and ineffective deterrent, but because of the “principle in itself” (Derrida, 2012).

Figure 7
Reveries of the milkshake and the denture: figural prenancies of moral injury.

The milkshake is thrown out of the car window by the policewoman who, sitting in the passenger seat, was distractedly consuming the drink instead of covering her partner during his approach to the suspect vehicle and was therefore surprised by the shots that killed him. In the re-enactments of the crime, Morris repeatedly shows the milkshake flying out of the window and spilling onto the floor with the use of closed frames and slow motion effects, under the stylized sound of gunshots that add to the dramatic weight of the scenes.

The repetition of these shots undermines any confidence in the police officer’s testimony to identify her colleague’s killer and, by poetic association, also denounces the judicial errors and deliberate omissions in the conviction of Randall Adams. What’s more, the prevalence of the milkshake reverie expands awareness of the moral damage caused by the crime of blood, encompassing the neglect that caused an innocent man to suffer on death row due to human hypocrisy. At this level of imaginative speculation, everyone involved in the fraudulent sentencing to the electric chair is a potential murderer – the death penalty itself is in doubt on principle.

Jacek Lazar strikes the taxi driver on the head with an iron bar until his dentures are knocked out. The thing is, while Morris repeats the plastic image of the milkshake, Kieślowski stages the murder in almost real time and shows every detail of the physical violence live, because you have to see and hear everything that it is: cruelty. The close-ups of the faces and hands of the perpetrator and the victim, whose physiognomies and gestures express the physical and moral agony of the clash between those who kill and those who struggle to survive, produce the emotional escalation of a construction that is not rhetorical, because we don’t even know the killer’s motivation, and the taxi driver is chosen at random.

The treatment depends not on rhetoric, but on poetics, no matter how dark, capable of directly showing moral injury, revealing the impure force of the violation of human life. The image of the dentures on the ground is the sudden moment of an intuitive vision of the violence of blood crime as a source of human misery. The close-up on the dentures is a precursor that enhances the visually similar shot in which we see Jacek Lazer releasing excrement into the tray arranged under the scaffold during his execution. It’s an image of foresight that links the violence of homicide to legalized murder as a growing accumulation of violence: in principle, taking from the criminal the same life taken from his victim is even more degrading; it’s a moral injury that affects humanity as a whole.

The reveries of justice find in the highly prevalent images of the milkshake and the denture two points of intensity of the abolitionist imagination which, driven by the inviolability of the right to life, transfer from the plasticity of blood crimes the poetic and political energy needed to condemn the death penalty as a natural punitive gesture. The milkshake and denture shots redirect this energy to organize a sensitive criticism of the death penalty through the perceptive condensation of judicial farce and legalized homicide, contrasting these moral weaknesses with the fundamental values of human life as incommensurable, and sacred in themselves.

It is in the intensity of these two details that all the relevant angles of imagining the abolition of the death penalty are presented in The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing: the irreparable miscarriage of justice; the punishment that is worse than the crime. The reveries of justice grow more conscious when the relationship between moral weaknesses and human virtues closes in on an image common to both killers in their personal dramas. Jacek Lazar lost his sister to a tractor driven by his friend after the two got drunk on vodka for fun. David Harris, the real killer of the policeman, lost his younger brother to drowning in a swimming pool due to the carelessness of his father, who nevertheless emotionally punishes his eldest son for the tragedy. They are on the run from past traumas and perhaps wouldn’t have committed the murders otherwise. In any case, they belong to a common humanity that suffers and holds life as an inviolable value (Figure 8).

Figure 8
The traumas of Jacek Lazar and David Harris: a common humanity.

Therefore, when Bachelard (2009, p. 4) teaches that it is with reverie that we must learn the phenomenology of the image, it is because the phenomenological approach requires us to activate participation in the “creative imagination” whose origin emanates from films that lead us back to it because they are its poetic documents. These documents bring together the sensitive signs of the impulses granted to the reveries of justice, considering the parameters of color, light, shadow, movement, sound, shot composition, angles, art direction, editing, etc.

The figural analysis of The Thin Blue Line and A Short Film About Killing demonstrates that the creative imagination has a poetic intentionality that is politically driven by the abolition of the death penalty as a moral postulate, and so the “figural event” becomes inseparable from its mobilizations. Returning to Dubois’ ideas (2012, p. 100; 110), we conclude that it is through the effects of presence and sensation, rather than representation or meaning, that the sense of abolitionist justice is imprinted on us through the traces of the passage of the filmic figures, that is, through the moments of rupture and unity of the figural: it is when “there is nothing to say and everything to see”.

The proximity between the films provided by the comparative gaze ensures that there is ample sensitive evidence of the creative imagination operating in reveries and guarantees the breadth of visual and sound references necessary to approach the mobilizations of the figural in its poetic materializations. As a result, film analysis prioritizes the values and treatments attributed to the visual motif of the death penalty, while at the same time theorizing cinema itself.

Many other dimensions of the films could be analyzed and explored in depth, but they have already been exhaustively debated (Stok, 1993; Resha, 2015). From the point of view of the abolitionist imagination, the criticism of the death penalty emerges and expands as reveries uof justice from within the poetics of the blood crimes themselves, because it depends on the moral injury originally contained in their plasticity.

The moral injury is linked to the figural in the construction of the image event, as well as questioning the human corruption and cynicism that condemned an innocent man to death in The Thin Blue Line and the power of the State and its right over life and death in A Short Film About Killing. The abolitionist imagination requires homicides to be a turning point for the death penalty as a method of justice, because if a person kills out of vile passions or feelings, the State, which has a monopoly on force and murders in the name of justice in a mediated and rational way, cannot be on the same level as the individual, because the moral damage would be “disproportionate” (Bobbio, 2004). Prosecutors, judges and false witnesses are also willing to kill for obscure interests in a judicial process that is supposed to be rational.

This asymmetry between the crime of blood committed by ordinary people and the legal murder prosecuted by the State is the point of imaginative speculation around which the unity and rupture of figuration take place. This is how the visual evidence demonstrates the appearance of the political imagination of the death penalty’s abolition, the reveries of which are driven by the inviolability of human life: this is the hidden postulate of the films’ innovative figurative logics, which provide poetic experiences with justice. In these experiences, the figural is laid bare cinematically and reveals fiction and documentary as filmic reveries.

Notes

• 1
  This article presents the results of the research project Figurações da Justiça: imaginação política e formas morais no cinema moderno [Figurations of Justice: political imagination and moral forms in modern cinema (1945-1991)], the aim of which is to understand political cinema from the point of view of figural analysis, looking for dialogues between “figurative invention” (Brenez, 1998) and the circulation of political “visual motifs” in terms of their poetic treatments (Balló; Bergala, 2016).
• 2
  From this point of view, the films dialog imaginatively with the abolitionist tradition descended from the political modernism of Beccaria (2020) and Hugo (2020) who, only recently, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, first questioned the morality of the death penalty after millennia of suffering (Bobbio, 2004). The imagination emanating from the political philosophy and literature of these two pioneering authors, among others who came later, such as Camus (2010), fueled artistic works that, during the 20^th century, depicted this form of punishment as useless, inhumane, dangerous and, above all, immoral because it violated the right to life. In cinema, The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Carl T. Dreyer, 1928) and Death By Hanging (Koshikei, Nagisa Oshima, 1968) stand out among others.
• 3
  Dubois (2012, p. 116-118) draws attention to the fact that figural analysis cannot be restricted to the details of the images. This is only the starting point, “half the journey”. The other half requires going beyond the experience, building the interpretation: the figural as the construction of the event. However, the author does not go into depth on how to construct the structure of the symptomatic event, as this is a “complex debate with the phenomenology of the image”. He only offers brief indications. In this sense, considering films as “forms that think”, a permanent dialogue must be maintained between theoretical writing and film analysis, inquiring how films elaborate the sensitive criticism of the death penalty and, simultaneously, reflect on and theorize cinema itself (its fictional and documentary figures) through the figurative logics they invent.
• The original text, translated by Tony O’Sullivan, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.

Availability of research data:

the dataset supporting the results of this study is published in this article.

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• Editor in charge:
  Rossana Della Costa

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  11 Apr 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  15 Feb 2024
• Accepted
  29 July 2024