Over at his New York Times blog, filmmaker Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, Fog of War, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) discusses the possibilities and perils of using dramatic re-enactments in his documentaries. Unlike Michael Moore, Morris holds his audience’s intellect in high regard, and thus feels compelled to meditate on the implications of recreating reality in this way.

Morris points out that re-enactments are generally unpopular with critics. We associate them with the kind of arch, unimaginative documentaries that are the bread and butter of cable channels like History. They feel too many steps removed from the truth they are intended to dramatize. They either feel deceptive or drained of all perspective. Perhaps it also has something to do with the truth-challenged nature of our televisual culture; we’re all too aware of how packaged and often compromised our news reporting has become. It’s a reality that has made the verité doc, progenitor of reality television, and the archival collage film (in which old clips are re-assembled to provide ironic commentary on the past; e.g. Ron Mann) the most common strategies employed by serious documentarians (a category which does not include your Micheal Moores or Morgan Spurlocks).

Morris is thoughtful, brave and adept enough to attempt navigating the many aesthetic and moral issues that the re-enactment presents. And he has good reason to do so: his most famous re-enactment, a scene at the heart of The Thin Blue Line, helped get a man off death row.

The point he makes here is that there is no inherent truth in any sort of documentary filmmaking. Even the verité director is making aesthetic and moral choices while engaged in the act of shooting present-time, and again later in the editing suite.

The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason. It wasn’t a cinéma vérité documentary that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was a film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation – part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It’s not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It’s the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth.

Standard Operating Procedures, Morris’s latest film, arrives in theatres imminently. It’s about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. For more Morris, there’s an exchange between him and wild man Werner Herzog at The Believer, and if you search the iTunes store under “Errol Morris New Yorker” you’ll find a video podcast interview with him from last year’s New Yorker Festival.