Introduction to Documentary

Bill Nichols is Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University and author of Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (IUP, 1992) and Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (IUP, 1995).

"This engaging, thoughtful, accessible, and comprehensive work will stimulate many to teach documentary film." Choice "Bill Nichols' succinct Introduction to Documentary would make an ideal textbook, and that's no back-handed compliment. Patiently, almost tenderly, the author leads the reader step by step through the thicket of moral, political, aesthetic and technological issues documentary film raises - writing in a clean style that doesn't simplify ideas so much as distil them. As hapless tutors groping for a pat definition know, documentary is an exasperatingly 'fuzzy' mode whose tactics of representation can't always be distinguished from those of fiction. Cutting to the quick of the matter, Nichols suggest that the main difference is epistemological. Where fiction suspends our disbelief regarding the imaginary world it portrays, documentary whets our intellectual curiosity about the world out there. But since distortions are possible - indeed necessary - it becomes a question of faith on the viewer's part and scruples on the film-maker's. The most original pages draw on Aristotelian first principles to propose documentary as a branch of rhetoric that sways us by fair means or foul. Decidedly the latter in the case of Leni Riefensahl's propaganda classic 'Triumph of the Will' (1936, left) - rather startlingly pegged as an observational documentary in the sense that its stage-managed events are offered without overt editorializing. Whenever feasible, however, Nichols cites works beyond the official canon, a practice that lends the book much vitality while affirming those democratic values the best documentaries continue to exemplify." Sight & Sound (August 2002)