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Title: Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary
ISBN: 0253340608
Author:
Bill Nichols
Publicate Date: 1991-12
Publish: 1991-12
List Price: $39.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest Used Price: $9.98
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| Customer Review: |
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1: a trip to unreadable
This attempt at discussing documentary film is fraught with difficulties for the reader. The prose is clumsy, circumstantial and muddled to the point that I found myself reading passages aloud to others for help. Unfortunately none was forthcoming.There is little excuse to buy this book when there are so many good ones such as those by Barnouw and Jacobs which area clear and informative.
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2: A Due Question for Documentary
Representing Reality theorizes documentary in all-round perspectives. Among others, I think this book is important especially in that it raises the question of reality per se. Documentary has always been marginal not only in discourse but also in cinema industry, under the poor understanding of reality. I think Nichols's notion of "reflexivity" is a key concept itself in understanding documentary, which also provides a good alternative reading regarding what is documentary or not. I think this book will give you a great deal of food for thought, when you have ever contemplated what is real and when we become to question about what we are seeing, not only in films but also in real life.
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3: Bill Nichols should not be allowed to write
Bill Nichols is full of words and empty of thought. You need a machete to slash through the tangled sentences in this book, and what you'll find beneath are simplistic, flawed ideas that aren't developed but buried under more verbiage. Nichols stitches suffixes and prefixes to ordinary nouns, creating monsters like "situatedness," "hyperrationality," "reconceptualization," "polyvocality," "relationality," "talismanic"(!), and the pseudo-literate's favorite word of all: "juxtaposition." Each of those words costs as much time to understand as a whole chapter of Erik Barnouw's book (which is succinct, informative and even humorous). Mr. Nichols should be sealed in a cave and his books slung into outer space, for they pollute the body of film knowledge. Don't buy "Representing Reality" unless you want to know how confused Mr. Nichols's reality is.
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4: great book for learning about doc. concepts and issues
the book has a lot of useful insights and info about doc. it is harder than the Barnouw book because it is less chatty but it is also rich in food for thought. It takes up things like ethics and documentary style, how different kinds of documentary are similar and different, and how the human body is a really important topic in documentary, pornography and anthropology.
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