I'm afraid that the following is a bit long, but I've been pretty quiet lately. The recent discussions about documentary film and social change seem to have three themes which seem to elide each other. The Roger and Me thread seems a curious mix of arguing that ends justify means (or "history will absolve me", as Joe Stalin once put it, and the notion of "art as a weapon." Alas, art has never been particularly successful as a weapon. I believe that it was Walter Benjamin who described Fascism as the aestheticization of politics and Communism as the politicization of art. Another thread seems to resurrect the hypodermic theory of attitude change and clothe it in social change raiments. Crudely stated, it assumes that one shot of enlightenment, one HARVEST OF SHAME, changes things. Those of us who have labored in the vineyard of information campaigns know that it is a very slow process, and that the attitude change-information change-behavior change paradigm is not magically useful in creating change. Curiously, behavior change (such as smoking bans) is frequently followed by attitude and information change. Where documentaries can have effect is in raising the public visibility of issues, or "agenda setting." But this is an early step, and unless it is followed by continual repetition and reinforcement of theme, it too can disappear. Finally, there is the thread that started all of this, which was the film maker identifying with the subject and deceiving himself/herself that she and the subject are the same. Cal Pryluck pointed out the essential differences in a seminal essay some years ago, and repeated the gist of it in his comments. I once heard a British television executive of Indian origin describe these sorts of folks as "behalfers", people who make films on behalf of others. When the National Film Board of Canada began its CHALLENGE FOR CHANGE program, which was about film and social change, first-class film makers like Colin Low worked with local fisherman in Fogo Island to make films about local conditions, so as to enlighten the Ottawa bureaucracy in ways that the locals could not put in writing. By the time the program got to Montreal, the local people realized that they should be making the films themselves, and took control of the project. Bonnie Klein's NFB film VTR ST.JACQUES documents the process. Finally, there is an interesting discussion of early network documentary values and methods in the current JOURNALISM MONOGRAPHS (137/February 1993)by MichaelCurtin, entitled Packaging Reality, The Influence of Fictional Forms on the Early Development of Television Documentary. As for the "objectivity -subjectivity" argument, I've found that the insertion of the word "honest" somewhere in the discussion tends to be helpful. -Henry Breitrose Stanford