The third edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. A new chapter, "I Want to Make a Documentary: Where Do I Start?" guides readers through the steps of planning and preproduction and includes an example of a project proposal for a film that went on to win awards at major festivals. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduction to Documentary 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 "Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?" Here Nichols has fully rewritten each chapter for greater clarity and ease of use, including revised discussions of earlier films and new commentary on dozens of recent films from The Cove to The Act of Killing and from Gasland to Restrepo.

The third edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. A new chapter, "I Want to Make a Documentary: Where Do I Start?" guides readers through the steps of planning and preproduction and includes an example of a project proposal for a film that went on to win awards at major festivals. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduction to Documentary 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 "Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?" Here Nichols has fully rewritten each chapter for greater clarity and ease of use, including revised discussions of earlier films and new commentary on dozens of recent films from The Cove to The Act of Killing and from Gasland to Restrepo.

Risk has always been central to finance, and managing risk depends critically on information. As evidenced by recent events, the need has never been greater for skills, systems and methodologies to manage risk information in financial markets. Authored by leading figures in risk management and analysis, this handbook serves as a unique and comprehensive reference for the technical, operational, regulatory and political issues in collecting, measuring and managing financial data. It will appeal to a wide range of audiences, from financial industry practitioners and regulators responsible for implementing risk management systems, to system integrators and software firms helping to improve such systems. Volume I examines the business and regulatory context that makes risk information so important. A vast set of techniques and processes have grown up over time, and without an understanding of the broader forces at work, it is all too easy to get lost in the details.

Risk has always been central to finance, and managing risk depends critically on information. As evidenced by recent events, the need has never been greater for skills, systems and methodologies to manage risk information in financial markets. Authored by leading figures in risk management and analysis, this handbook serves as a unique and comprehensive reference for the technical, operational, regulatory and political issues in collecting, measuring and managing financial data. It is targeted towards a wide range of audiences, from financial industry practitioners and regulators responsible for implementing risk management systems, to system integrators and software firms helping to improve such systems. Volume 2 describes a structural and operational framework for managing a financial risk data repository. As experience accumulates on managing modern risk systems, the knowledge base of practical lessons grows. Understanding these issues and leading practices may mean the difference between failed and successful implementations of risk systems.

How do issues of form and content shape the documentary film? What role does visual evidence play in relation to a documentary's arguments about the world we live in? In what ways do documentaries abide by or subvert ethical expectations? Are mockumentaries a form of subversion? Can the documentary be an aesthetic experience and at the same time have political or social impact? And how can such impacts be empirically measured[unk] Pioneering film scholar Bill Nichols investigates the ways documentaries strive for accuracy and truthfulness and simultaneously fabricate a form that shapes reality. Such films may rely on reenactment to re-create the past, storytelling to provide satisfying narratives, and rhetorical figures such as metaphor or devices such as irony to make a point. Documentaries are truly a fiction unlike any other. With clarity and passion, Nichols offers incisive commentaries on the basic questions of documentary's distinct relationship to the reality it represents, as well as close readings of provocative documentaries from this form's earliest days to its most recent incarnations. These essays offer a definitive account of what makes documentary film such a vital part of our cultural landscape.

..". 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"

How do issues of form and content shape the documentary film? What role does visual evidence play in relation to a documentary's arguments about the world we live in? In what ways do documentaries abide by or subvert ethical expectations? Are mockumentaries a form of subversion? Can the documentary be an aesthetic experience and at the same time have political or social impact? And how can such impacts be empirically measured? Pioneering film scholar Bill Nichols investigates the ways documentaries strive for accuracy and truthfulness and simultaneously fabricate a form that shapes reality. Such films may rely on reenactment to re-create the past, storytelling to provide satisfying narratives, and rhetorical figures such as metaphor or devices such as irony to make a point. Documentaries are truly a fiction unlike any other. With clarity and passion, Nichols offers incisive commentaries on the basic questions of documentary's distinct relationship to the reality it represents, as well as close readings of provocative documentaries from this form's earliest days to its most recent incarnations. These essays offer a definitive account of what makes documentary film such a vital part of our cultural landscape.

Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analysed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking fromNanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those ""regimes of truth"" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume. Contributors Include: Bart Testa, Carl Plantinga, Caryl Flinn, Catherine Russell, Charlie Keil, David T. Johnson, Diane Scheinman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Jeanne Hall, Jeffrey K. Ruoff, Jim Leach, Joan Nicks, Joanne Hershfield, John R. Cook, Julia Lesage, Leshu Torchin, Linda Williams, Lucy Fischer, Matthew Bernstein, Paula J. Massood, Robert Stam, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Seth Feldman, Sheila Petty, Thomas Waugh, Virginia Bonner, Vivian Sobchack, William Guynn, William Rothman.

Peter Forgacs, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. "Cinema's Alchemist" offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which Forgacs reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.

Contributors: Whitney Davis, U of California, Berkeley; Laszlo F. Foldenyi, U of Theatre, Film and Television, Budapest; Marsha Kinder, U of Southern California; Tamas Koranyi; Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Roger Odin, U of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle; Catherine Portuges, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan U; Kaja Silverman, U of Pennsylvania; Ernst van Alphen, Leiden U, the Netherlands; Malin Wahlberg, Stockholm U.

The original Movies and Methods volume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture. Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.

To what degree, Nichols asks, does ideology inform images in films, advertising, and other media? Does the cinema or any other sign system liberate ormanipulate us? How can we as spectators know when the media are subtly perpetuatinga specific set of values? To address these issues, the author draws from a varietyof approaches -- Marxism, psycholanalysis, communication theory, semiotics, structuralism, the psychology of perception. Working with two interrelated theories-- ideology and image-systems, and ideology and principles of textual criticism --Nichols shows how and why we make emotional investments in sign sytsems with anideological context.

Film teachers and students will welcome this new anthology, which makes available in one source a comprehensive selection of recent theoretical work on film, including many articles difficult to locate in the scattered literature. The contents are drawn almost entirely from the publications of the past fifteen years, and include work by the most original film thinkers - some well known to a wide public, some widely known among readers of film journals. Several important filmmakers are also represented. The materials have been grouped in critical categories reflecting recent approaches to the medium. In place of older questions such as the relation of film to other arts, or film's ability to capture an imprint of reality, the questions emphasized in the anthology concern film's ideological operations, the nature of film genres, the role of the auteur in the creative process, the representation of social groups (such as women) in film, the logical of narrative and formal organizations in films, the treatment of films as myths, and new theoretical perspectives. Thus the contents reflect the use of political, structualist, semiological and psychoanalytic methods, as well as those of more traditional criticism. There is virtually no duplication of materials included in the Mast & Cohen anthology "Film Theory and Criticism". The editor has provided an overall general introduction, and mini-introductions to each text. A glossary of terms used in structuralist-semiological work is included, and lists of additional readings are provided. Its scope and careful organization will make this volume a fundamental resource for film scholarship and teaching.

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."

Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, the legendary Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer, filmmaker and impresario. Her efforts to promote an independent cinema have inspired filmmakers for over fifty years. "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943) ranks among the most widely viewed of all avant-garde films. The eleven essays gathered here examine Maya Deren's writings, films, and legacy from a variety of intriguing perspectives. Some address her relative neglect during the rise of feminist film theory; all argue for her enduring significance. The essays cast light on her aesthetics and ethics, her exploration of film form and of other cultures, her role as (woman) artist and as film theorist. "Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde" also includes one of the most significant reflections on the nature of art and the responsibilities of the filmmaker ever written--Deren's influential but long out-of-print book, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, " in its entirety.
Among the topics covered in this volume are Deren's ties with the avant-garde of her day and its predecessors; her perspective on vodoun ritual, possession ceremonies, and social harmony; her work in relation to the modern dance tradition and its racial inflections; her thoughts, written in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about science, including how form can embody moral principles; the complex issue of the "woman artist" in an avant-garde dominated by men; her famous dispute with Anais Nin; and an exploration of issues of identification and desire in her major films.
As the first critical evaluation of the enduring significance of Maya Deren, this book clarifies the filmmaker's theoretical and cinematic achievements and conveys the passionate sense of moral purpose she felt about her art. It is a long-overdue tribute to one of the most important and least written about filmmakers in American cinema, an artist who formulated the terms and conditions of independent cinema that remain with us today.