Documentary claims to show what happened, but almost none of its persuasive force comes from any single shot; it comes from sequence, from what is placed before and after a given image so that the viewer supplies the causal connection the footage itself never actually proves. Two directors working from an identical pool of raw material can construct opposing arguments about the same event purely through ordering, and both cuts will feel, to their respective audiences, like unmediated evidence rather than interpretation. EvidenceAmbiguity names this gap between a shot's evidentiary weight in isolation and the much stronger, often unwarranted, weight it acquires once embedded in a sequence that implies causation the footage cannot independently support. Treating documentary truth as a property of the individual frame, verifiable by checking whether the camera was 'really there', misses where the actual argument-making happens: in the cut, not the capture.
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