1. Many of the distinctive characteristics of documentary are examined broadly in Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 170-284. Here I shall concentrate on more recent films and some of the particular problems they pose.

2. Films referred to in the article or instrumental in formulating the issues of self-reflexive documentary form include: The Atomic Cafe (USA, Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty, 1982), Controlling Interest (USA, SF Newsreel, 1978), The Day After Trinity (USA, Jon Else, 1980), Harlan County, USA (USA, Barbara Kopple, 1976), Hollywood on Trial (USA, David Halpern, Jr., 1976), Models (USA, Fred Wiseman, 1981), Nuove Frontiera ( Looking for Better Dreams ) (Switzerland, Remo Legnazzi, 1981), On Company Business (USA, Allan Francovich, 1981), Prison for Women (Canada, Janice Cole, Holly Dale, 1981), Rape (USA, JoAnn Elam, 1977), A Respectable Life (Sweden, Stefan Jarl, 1980), Rosie the Riveter (USA, Connie Field, 1980); The Sad Song of Yellow Skin (Canada, NFB, Michael Rubbo, 1970), Soldier Girls (USA, Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill, 1981); They Call Us Misfits (Sweden, Jan Lindquist, Stefan Jarl, c. 1969), Not a Love Story (Canada, NFB, Bonnie Klein, 1981), The Trials of Alger Hiss (USA, John Lowenthal, 1980), Union Maids (USA, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, Miles Mogulescu, 1976), Who Killed the Fourth Ward? (USA, James Blue, 1978), The Wilmar 8 (USA, Lee Grant, 1980), With Babies and Banners (USA, Women's Labor History Film Project, 1978), A Wive's Tale (Canada, Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock, 1980), The Wobblies (USA, Stuart Bird, Deborah Shaffer, 1979), World Is Out (USA, Mariposa Collective, 1977).

3. Perhaps the farthest extremes of evidence and argument occur with pornography and propaganda: what would pornography be without its evidence, what would propaganda be without its arguments?

4. Without models of documentary strategy that invite us to reflect on the construction of social reality, we have only a corrective act of negation ("this is not reality, it is neither omniscient nor objective") rather than an affirmative act of comprehension ("this is a text, these are its assumptions, this is the meaning it produces"). The lack of an invitation to assume a positive stance handicaps us in our efforts to understand the position we occupy; refusing a position proffered to us is far from affirming a position we actively construct. It is similar to the difference between refusing to "buy" the messages conveyed by advertising, at least entirely, while still lacking any alternative non-fetishistic presentation of commodities that can help us gain a different "purchase" on their relative use-and exchange-value. In many ways, this problem of moving from refusal to affirmation, from protest at the way things are to the construction of durable alternatives, is precisely the problem of the American left. Modernist strategies have something to contribute to the resolution of this problem.

5. After completing this article, I read Jeffrey Youdelman's "Narration, Invention and History" ( Cineaste , 12:2, pp. 8-15), which makes a similar point with a somewhat different set of examples. His discussion of imaginative, lyrical uses of commentary in the thirties and forties is particularly instructive.

6. Details of de Antonio's approach are explored in Tom Waugh's "Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies," Jump Cut , no. 10/11 (1976), pp. 33-39, and of Wiseman's in my Ideology and the Image , pp. 208-236.

7. An informative discussion of the contradiction between character witnesses with unusual abilities and the rhetorical attempt to make them signifiers of ordinary workers, particularly in Union Maids , occurs in Noel King's "Recent 'Political' Documentary—Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA," Screen , vol. 22, no. 2(1981), pp. 7-18.

8. In this vein, Noel King comments, "So in the case of these documentaries ( Union Maids, With Babies and Banners, Harlan County, USA ) we might notice the way a discourse of morals or ethics suppresses one of politics and the way a discourse of a subject's individual responsibility suppresses any notion of a discourse on the social and linguistic formation of subjects" ("Recent 'Political' Documentary," p. 11). But we might also say, as the filmmakers seem to, "This is how the participants saw their struggle and it is well-worth preserving" even though we may wish they did not do so slavishly. There is a difference between criticizing films because they fail to demonstrate the theoretical sophistication of certain analytic methodologies and criticizing them because their textual organization is inadequate to the phenomena they describe.