As testimony-based documentary films and audio-visual testimonial archives proliferate around the globe, we must ask probing questions about how to mobilize these materials for historiographic purposes. Scholarship from the disciplines of psychology, history and the law amply illustrates that the truths of eyewitness testimony about catastrophic past events may not lie on the surface. This article explores how current findings about the vagaries of memory together with the analytic strategies of film studies can help us comprehend (1) the contingent truths of direct testimony by documentary film subjects, and (2) the historical significance of the films created in, through and beyond their affecting words. Emphasis is on experimental documentary practices rather than seamless, conventional ones. Moving testimonies, whether part of the new, grand archival projects or contained within individual documentaries, are most effective when their complicated, recursive, even forgetful aspects are emphasized and acknowledged.
