Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition

The fourth edition of Bill Nichols’s best-selling text provides new critical material on reenactments, encounter, and testimony or bearing witness. Introduction to Documentary is designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies. It identifies the genre’s distinguishing qualities and teaches the viewer how to read documentary film. Each chapter takes up a discrete question, from ＂How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started?＂ to ＂How Have Documentaries Responded to Identity Politics and Social Issues?＂ Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas.

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.