This article argues that Su Friedrich's 1984 film The Ties That Bind employs what were at the time atypical forms and techniques to push the limits of the traditional historical documentary. Its aesthetic experimentation helps to redefine the idea of historical representation in film and does so mainly by treating evidence as both partial (in both senses of the word) and contingent offering a radical challenge to normative history and destabilizing the notion of history as authority. Unlike ...