Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition

The fourth edition of Bill Nichols’s best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas.

Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers. Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial factors that move documentary film away from objective documentation and toward the thought-provoking realm of arguments, perceptions, and perspectives that draw from a filmmaker’s unique sensibility to help us see the world as we have not seen it before. Exploring ethics, history, different modes of documentary, key social issues addressed, and both the origins and evolution of this form, this updated volume also offers guidance on how to write about documentaries and how to begin the process of making one.

Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition will be of use not only to film students but also those in adjacent fields where visual representations of reality play an important role: journalism, sociology, anthropology, feminist and ethnic studies, among others.

Bill Nichols is Professor Emeritus of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is author of Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary; Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture; Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies; and Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. He is also editor of Movies and Methods, Volumes I and II.Jaimie Baron is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Alberta. She is author of The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History and Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era. She is founder and director of the Festival of (In)appropriation and (with Kristen Fuhs) founder and editor of the website Docalogue.