Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Location An Evocation
• II The Trials and Tribulations of Rodney King
• III At the Limits of Reality (TV)
• IV The Ethnographer's Tale
• V Performing Documentary
• VI Eisenstein's Strike and the Genealogy of Documentary
• VII Please, All you Good and Honest People
• Film Form and Historical Consciouness
• Notes
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This trenchant, provocative study dealing with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction film/video examines how contemporary forms of documentary expression force a reconsideration of "realism and its successors." In seven linked essays, Nichols (San Francisco State Univ.) examines several questions of meaning prompted by contemporary culture. He provides a rigorous evaluation of reality television; a discussion of the current trials and tribulations of modern ethnographic films and filmmakers; a stunning reclamation of Eisenstein's Strike (1925) as a "true" documentary; a brilliant exposition of the Rodney King video clip's contextual use in the trials of the accused police officers; and an unveiling of performing documentary (a fifth mode of documentary form, which he adds to expository, interactive, observational, and reflexive). The final essay deals with "retrospection," a complex analysis of how our models of the future, past, and present impinge on our "understanding" of four film/video texts (Oliver Stone's JFK; Who Killed Vincent Chin; Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam; and a collective Gulf War text composed of recorded footage from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN). A demanding but extremely valuable work, recommended for upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections. R. E. Sutton American University