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Epistemological or communicative reliability is a matter of degree. Of course all films are more or less unreliable but that does not make for any condition of absolute unreliability. All reliability is more or less assessable. Contingent reliability is the predicament of cinema (as it is of language and observation and science and history). It is a predicament that each discipline deals with. Cinematic art makes a virtue of it - the structural device of unreliable narrator being one instance - but I suspect all fiction arises from this problematic. Documentaries (including cinematic historiography) have to deal with it in a different way or ways. Reflexivity is an old epistemological strategy one function of which has been that of assessing or establishing reliability. A subject aware of the subjectivity of observation is able to use that awareness to increase the reliability of the observation, even though self reference and self depiction can also be tantamount to deception or self deception. (Sometimes deception or even self deception might be just what a subject needs.) In communication it is used, among other things, to certify reliability - a certification that can of course be used in a rhetoric of deception. Reflexivity in documentaries may be judged on things like its role in the film's reliability, openess, truth, honesty, and its heuristic role (that word again) in the discovery or creation of significant cinematic concepts. Ross Ross