Questions as Inheritance: Learning from Jill Godmilow (1943-2025)

In nearly every class I teach, Jill Godmilow is present through her Questionnaire for Doing a Close Reading of a Documentary Film¹ , a deceptively simple set of questions that train students to think critically about moving images. Her prompts are acts of interrogation—persistent disruptions that ask not only what a film shows, but how and why it shows it. Consider one: Exactly how did the director’s shooting style, lighting, and pacing support their purposes? This feels familiar, the kind of question anyone teaching filmmaking might ask. But then comes something less expected: What did the film advocate? Did it tell you what to do now? How to live in the world? In other words she asks: Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? Such questions are not standard, and therein lies their power. 

What makes the questionnaire so distinctive is its layered architecture: it moves students from the surface of a film’s form to the depths of its ideology. Each layer is an interrogation—of craft, of ethics, of audience positioning—that exposes the assumptions beneath documentary practice. Questions about organization, editing, and music invite close attention to form, while prompts about contracts with social actors or the privileging and repressing of information foreground the ethical stakes of representation. Godmilow does not stop at mechanics but presses into the audience’s position: How are we made to identify? What emotions are stirred, and to what end? 

Perhaps most radical are her counterfactual provocations—what if gender or ethnicity were flipped, or if the same materials were reassembled to argue the opposite point? These moves force students to imagine films as contingent rather than inevitable, revealing the politics embedded in form. Her emphasis on values, ideology, and self-reflexivity insists that no documentary is “just” about its subject; every film is also about how it was made, what it wants from us, and what kind of world it envisions. In this sense, Godmilow’s questionnaire is less a checklist than a pedagogical tool for critical consciousness, training students to see films not as neutral windows but as arguments in motion. 

The twenty questions she devised are not simply prompts but engines of thought, opening onto further inquiry. I return to them often, not only in the classroom but also in the process of making moving-image work. They serve as a guide that bridges practice and theory, equally at home in pedagogy and in the generative measurement of creation. 

The death of Jill Godmilow marks the loss of a provocative and uncompromising voice in cinema. She was a filmmaker, a critic, and a teacher, but above all a relentless interrogator who refused to let difficult questions be buried or ignored. At the University of Notre Dame, where she taught film production and critical studies until her retirement, and across a career spanning more than five decades, she produced over ten films, ranging from documentaries and shorts to a fictional feature.  

Godmilow’s films, like her writings, are structured around questions—about representation, authorship, and the responsibilities of political cinema. They do not simply deliver facts or images, but interrogate the very conditions under which those facts and images acquire meaning. 

Her 1984 film Far From Poland takes as its starting point the impossibility of making a conventional documentary about the Polish Solidarity movement from afar. Unable to travel to Poland, Godmilow stages the film from the United States, layering re-enactments, interviews, and media fragments. The film asks: can a filmmaker speak truthfully about a struggle from a distance? Rather than masking this problem, Godmilow foregrounds it, insisting that the act of representation itself is the subject. In this way, the film interrogates the very possibility of documentary truth, enacting her conviction that facts alone do not transform the world; only through questioning form and perspective can a film open up political thought. 

Her 1998 film What Farocki Taught continues this practice of interrogation through repetition. At first it glance is a faithful remake of Harun Farocki’s 1969 Inextinguishable Fire , a searing critique of the US production of napalm during the Vietnam War. Yet Godmilow frames the remake with her own presence, speaking about the process of reconstructing it, and thereby asking: what does it mean to repeat a film across decades and geographies? What is carried forward, and what inevitably changes? 

The film’s conclusion sharpens these questions. Farocki had never relied on spectacle; Instead, he forced viewers to imagine, to wrestle with their own complicity, to recognize that the machinery of war is sustained less by spectacle than by everyday institutions and choices. Godmilow extends this interrogative method in her own way: where Farocki had represented Dow Chemical symbolically, building a makeshift set in Germany to stand in for the corporation, she traveled to Michigan to film the actual headquarters. This gesture opens a dialogue with Farocki’s film, as if returning the place to him decades later, grounding his abstraction in concrete reality. Analytically, it unsettles the neat distinction between original and remake, interrogating how films speak to one another across time. Even her inclusion of practical information about where to find Farocki’s films in the United States extends this stance: a generous act that asks how one filmmaker might amplify another’s visibility, reaching across borders and histories. 

Through both films, Godmilow shows that the work of documentary is not simply to collect evidence but to insist on questions: What can be represented, who has the right to represent it, and what forms make critique possible? These are precisely the kinds of inquiries she codified years later in Kill the Documentary , where she urged filmmakers and students to abandon the “pornography of the real”² in favor of forms that provoke thought rather than pacify. Her films thus stood in direct continuity with her book: both insist that documentary is not a neutral record but an argument, a provocation, and ultimately, an invitation to think otherwise. 

I myself only had one brief encounter with Jill, yet it left a lasting impression. Her demeanor was unmistakably generational—strong, uncompromising, and forged in the spirit of the ’68ers, my mother’s generation. Many of the women I know from that generation embody a force of critique: not only the strength to analyze or oppose, but the choice to live in a posture of interrogation—intellectual, personal, and political at once. Jill seemed to carry that same unmistakable clarity. I first saw her at a post-screening Q&A, and what struck me was her intensity: the sense that questioning was not just an intellectual practice for her, but a way of being in the world. 

Near the end of her book she cites Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death : “The most that any of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object, ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”³ Her twenty questions are themselves an offering, left behind like Becker describes—tools to navigate the confusion, to sharpen our thinking, and to guide our own contributions to the life force.  

Jill Godmilow’s legacy is in the way she taught us to think, to ask, and to resist complacency. Her insistence on interrogation as a critical practice endures, reminding us that to make films—or to teach them—is always to make an offering: an intervention in how the world might yet be seen, questioned, and changed. 

Sophie Hamacher is an artist, teacher, and curator whose multidisciplinary work spans film, video, printmaking, and text. She investigates media histories, surveillance, and medical imaging through a range of forms, often drawing on archival material to examine how media shape memory, perception, and both personal and collective histories. Her work moves between independent studio practice and collaborative projects with artists, scientists, and scholars. She is the editor of Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press, 2023), a wide-ranging anthology of art and writing that examines the impact of surveillance on contemporary motherhood. Her website can be viewed here: https://sophiehamacher.com/

Footnotes

1 Jill Godmilow, Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 1

2 Jill Godmilow, What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary  (Peace Review 11, no. 1, March 1999): 91–98. 2

3 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1973): 285. 3