I actually like slipping from soapumentary to soupumentary, and I think that the English connotations of "soup" include the "mish-mash" inherent in the Norwegian version. Where I think that I disagree with my good friend Bjorn is his notion that things only "appear" to be different. It's not so much that one offers truth and the other doesn't, but that the ontological status the audience attributes to the action, events, object, and subjects is different. Documentaries, it seems to me, depend upon a belief in the actual existence of the subject as a person representing himself/herself, not someone else. To the degree that an audience or person shares this belief, which is quite different from a temporary suspension of disbelief, a documentary is perceived and experienced differently from a work of narrative or dramatic fiction. I think that phenomenologists are better able to separate documentary from other genres on the basis of audience perceptions of ontological states than structuralists, post-structuralists, and semiologists who focus upon