Unlike more traditional documentary makers, film and video artists don't necessarily present their images in a straightforward reportage style.

Often their films present political situations through a fragmentary narrative structure, offering different perspectives and voices, leaving the political question open to a range of interpretations.

Lis Rhodes uses a montage of still photographic, drawn images and voice-over to put forward the shocking conditions for migrant workers in Running Light. Her abstracted imagery presents the gravity of the situation without recourse to straightforward depiction. Sandra Lahire brings her critique of the effects of the nuclear power industry into the very material of film itself in Plutonium Blonde. By altering the colours and images during the printing process she mirrors the changes to the landscape and the workers affected by plutonium poisoning. In Castle 1, Malcolm Le Grice takes this a step further still, integrating an implicit criticism of the status quo by altering images of politicians and dignitaries not only in the printing process but also by an additional performative intervention.

The authoritative interpreting voice of the documentary reporter is often replaced with a more fragmentary soundtrack. In Plutonium Blonde, for example, many voices offer testimonial. The soundtrack for John Smith's film Blight, created in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook, weaves the ghostly voices of former inhabitants into bleak images of houses destroyed in the path of the M11. In Argument, Anthony McCall introduces the voices of the media in a critical dissection of male representation in magazines and television. David Lamelas's film Desert People asks us to re-consider our perception of how information is being relayed to us, in this case concerning the conditions of indigenous peoples. Whilst Let's Call It Love by Breda Beban mixes a love song with the sounds of war planes overhead to refer to the war in Bosnia.