Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

". . . a valuable and important book . . ." ?The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Representing Reality is the first book to offer a conceptual overview of documentary filmmaking practice. It addresses numerous social issues and how they are presented to the viewer by means of style, rhetoric, and narrative technique. The volume poses questions about the relationship of the documentary tradition to power, the body, authority, knowledge, and our experience of history. This study advances the pioneering work of Nichols's earlier book, Ideology and the Image.

"[Nichols] has written a road-block of a book which reconfigures the debate on the documentary at a new level of sophistication and complexity which can only be ignored at the risk of ignoring the whole area of documentary film." ?Sight and Sound

" . . . the most important book on documentary film yet published." ?Canadian Journal of Film Studies

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This difficult yet rewarding study contains unique and provocative ideas related to the documentary form. Rather than rehash the timeworn difficulty of defining what a documentary is, Nichols breaks new ground by setting out a new approach involving a number of different " These include four points of view: the filmmaker's control (mostly of material), the institution (the practitioners), the corpus of texts (more than 300 films are discussed), and the constituency of viewers (our/their expectations). Though not totally successful, this is a fresh look at the vexing problem of what exactly a documentary is and is not. His four modes--expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive--are quite helpful in structuring a discussion of the texts. A discourse comparing pornographic and ethnographic films is at one and the same time outrageous and compelling. The endnotes are extensive and useful, and a list of distributors of the films discussed is included. This book is definitely for faculty scholars, theoreticians, and graduate students. The language used is precise but tends often to obfuscate meaning in its desire to be correct. An important work for a research library. R. E. Sutton American University