Standard+Operating+Procedure

It is here that you should start a good convo, one that asks of style, function, form and not story or judgment (at least for the basis of an argument).

Here's a few thoughts..

We have discussed many facets of documentary truth and the creation of meaning (which, of course, alters our conception of what truth is). We may have even come to recognize the ultimate impossibility of a totalizing understanding of such a thing as truth. I use "thing" here intentionally as a vague word since truth is too. Specifically, we noticed how Trihn Mihn-ha points to the complications and slipperiness at the intersection of reality and moving image. To quote //Reassemblage// regarding the way that film (specifically ethnography) seeks to establish 'meaning' to every sign: "what about the internal commentary that escorts images?" In other words, do images "mean" something from the outside (the critic, theorist, observer), or do images manifest their own logic independent from this outside?

We have not yet talked about the ways that documentary appeals to our genuine desire for 'truth'. That is, although truth may be always already gone when we think we 'have it', our want/need to go after that truth is real and genuine. We want stability, something to fall back on; Higgins' article works from that side of the truth discussion. If Mihn-ha highlights the fissure between sign and reality, Higgins points to our human desire to bridge the gap between sign and reality. For her, documentary serves a particular purpose here, based no small part on our tradition of putting faith in images.