Rosello has considered the documentary film at different points in its history to evaluate how its rhetorical tools have shaped the reconstruction of the past at three specific moments in its formal evolution. While acknowledging the particularities of the expressive devices used in each film analyzed here, the modulation of meaning and the consolidation of memory in each specific period are all based on documentary principles. As has always been the case in the documentary genre, in the realm of representation, neutrality, objectivity and impartiality are referential illusions. In every discourse, there is a subject of the enunciation who speaks while silencing, who shows while concealing. Both the cinematic frame and the iconography of memory are direct heirs to the behavior of this subject.