An 'anti documentary', it investigates the formal apparatus through which language and meaning are made and communicated in documentary cinema and television The film applies an ideological position — an analysis of South Africa through the metaphor of Robben Island, a maximum security prison there — to a pluralistic interpretation of the formal possibilities of representing that position Language, understood as a mode of political control, is analyzed simultaneously as a means for controlling the viewer of the documentary in relation to the information such a film imparts Within this analysis, the film uses video and super 8mm, as well as the 16mm format in conjunction with natural and artificial languages (e g , logic), to develop its argument