Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition

by Bill Nichols, Jaimie Baron

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 journalism, sociology, anthropology, feminist and ethnic studies, among others.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2024

About the author

Bill Nichols (born 1942) is an American film critic and theoretician best known for his pioneering work as founder of the contemporary study of documentary film. His 1991 book, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, applied modern film theory to the study of documentary film for the first time. It has been followed by scores of books by others and by additional books and essays by Nichols. The first volume of his two-volume anthology Movies and Methods (1976, 1985) helped to establish film studies as an academic discipline.

Bill Nichols is Professor Emeritus in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University and Chair of the Documentary Film Institute advisory board.