Cal Pryluck's point is well taken, as usual. Until the development of portable camera and sound technologies that enabled direct cinema, cinema verite, and observational cinema (choose one or more), the mode for documentary film production was the scripted film, in which for the most part, attempts were made to tell real stories using the people who lived them. Humphrey Jennings' FIRES WERE STARTED, or Pat Jackson's RAIDER (a.k.a. WESTERN APPROACHES) are good examples, but if one goes back to Flaherty and NANOOK OF THE NORTH, Nanook re-enacts certain parts of what was either his life or Flaherty's imagining of an ideal type. George Stoney's film on the making of MAN OF ARAN demonstrates similar strategy on Flaherty's part. Remember, it was John Grierson who first noted that Flaherty's MOANA, also reorganized for camera, had "a certain documentary quality" thus bringing the term into use as a way of describing a certain kind of film. With the possible exception of DRIFTERS, there is no evidence that any of the Grierson-produced films lacked some renactment. The single obvious exception is HOUSING PROBLEMS, but the 35mm cameras, lights, and recording apparatus necessary to do talk-to-camera in location interiors in the mid-1930's certainly meant that this was no fly-on-the-wall observational film. I think that the seminal difference between this kind of documentary and the post-moderns to whom Jay Ruby refers is that these film makers assumed that there was an objective reality, and that the truth of that reality was to be found by means of empirical verifiability, and not ascribed to a social construct that varied radically from observer to observer. The line between fact and fiction seemed to be drawn to distinguish the empirically verifiable from the imagined, and truth claims derived from observation as opposed to theoretical elegance or internal consistency. Put plainly, there's a world of difference between Humphrey Jennings organizing men from the London Fire Brigade to re-enact for the camera their experiences in dealing with the result of an incendiary air raid, observed and scripted by Jennings, and, say Michael Moore, constructing a film about General Motors and the decline of Flint, Michigan by rearranging history and confecting a fictional story line about his inability to see Roger Smith, as a way of putting structure and stamping his personality onto the film. (Please note that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a friend or admirer of Mr. Smith, GM, or the management philosophy they represent.) It would seem to me that while the means of re-enactment seem similar in classical documentary and "post-modern" "documentary" (couldn't resist the second set of quotation marks) the fundamental difference is that the latter mode assumes that the line between fact and fiction is not just fuzzy, but rather is negotiable, depending on the ends. Henry Breitrose ([log in to unmask]) Stanford University