Hailing from Ontario, Canada, Waugh’s passion for film studies was nurtured at Columbia University in New York City in the mid-1970s under the guidance of renowned film scholars Andrew Sarris and Erik Barnouw. In 1984, he debuted as an author with the publication of Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary. The book’s “Introduction” bears the extended title “Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, Or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries.” This title presents a dialectical framework that intricately explores the relationship between, on the one hand, what I previously referred to as the subject-documentarian, and, on the other, “the real,” a recurring theme in documentary studies from the 1990s onward. The chapter delves into Waugh’s third subsection of the “Introduction” entitled “Documentary.” Its hundred-word opening paragraph posits a novel definiens to whose philosophical deconstruction the chapter is dedicated.