A number of recent independent documentaries have entered into a new relationship with archives and archival practices. Rather than simply mobilizing archival materials in a transparent manner, these films figure the archive itself and thus simulate for the viewer the experience of being in an archive, of following and trying to make sense of fragments and traces. More specifically, these documentaries begin by mobilizing material or textual objects to which the filmmaker has some personal connection and follow not the de ned trajectory of a journey but, rather, the tentative movements of an exploration.