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 Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 as well as many journal articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews. She is founder and director of the Festival of (In)appropriation, a yearly international festival of short experimental found-footage films and videos. She is also a cofounder and coeditor of Docalogue, an online space for scholars and filmmakers to engage in conversations about contemporary documentary, and the Docalogue book series. She is a 2022-23 recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. How Can We Define Documentary Film?

2. What Are the Constituent Elements of Documentary Film?

3. What Ethical Issues Arise in Documentary Filmmaking?

4. What Characterizes the Voice of Documentary and Its Relation to Storytelling?

5. What Are the Rhetorical and Poetic Contributions to Documentary?

6. How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started?

7. How Has Documentary Represented the Past?

8. What Are the Expository and Performative Modes of Documentary?

9. What Are the Observational and Participatory Modes of Documentary?

10. What Are the Poetic and Reflexive Modes of Documentary?

11. How Did the Nation-State Affect Documentary's Approach to Social Issues?

12. How Have Documentaries Responded to Identity Politics and Social Issues?

13. How Can We Write Effectively about Documentary Films?

14. I Want to Make a Documentary. How Do I Start?

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index