Bill Nichols

Education

• UCLA, Ph.D., Theater Arts (Film), 1978
• UCLA, M.A., Theater Arts (Film), 1972
• Stanford Medical School, 1965. Completed one year before changing career plans
• Duke University, B.A., Chemistry, 1964

Areas of Expertise

• Documentary and Ethnographic film
• Film history and theory
• Rhetoric and Visual Representation
• Constructivist Art and Soviet Cinema
• Postwar American Cinema
• Film Style
• Silent German Cinema
• Issues of Social and Historical Representation

Books

• Engaging Cinema: A Social Introduction to the Study of Film (New York: W.W. Norton, forthcoming)
• Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. (University of California Press, 2001)
• Introduction to Documentary. (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Blurred Boundaries (Indiana University Press, 1994). Named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice
• Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Indiana University Press, 199).
• La Representacion de la Realidad, Spanish translation by Josetxo Cerdan and Eduardo Iriarte. (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Paidos Iberica, 1997
• Movies and Methods, Volume II, ed., (Berkeley: University California Press , 1985)
• Ideology and the Image. (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1981)
• Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left. (New York: Arno Press,1980)
• Movies and Methods, ed Berkeley: University California Press, 1976)

Recent Articles

• “The Question of Evidence, The Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film,” Thomas Austin, ed., Rethinking Documentary (London: Open University Press, 2008)
• “Documentary Film,” Michael Griffin, ed., International Encyclopedia of Communications (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming)
• “Documentary,” in Pam Cook, ed., Third Edition, The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2007): 81-83.
• “Foreword,” Jill Nelmes, ed., Fourth Edition, Introduction to Film Studies, (New York: Routledge, 2007).
• “Film Studies,” in Barry Grant, ed., Schirmer Encylopedia of Film (New York: Thomson Gale, forthcoming).
• “The Terrorist Event,” in Mark Franko, ed., Ritual Transformations (New York: Routledge, 2006): 94-108 also in Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello, eds., special issue of Comparative Cultural Studies (CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007), Thematic Issue, Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror); also in Maria Dora Maurão and Amir Labaki, eds., O Cinema do Real (Ediciones Colihue, Buenes Aires, Argentina, 2005): 174-195.
• “The Question of Evidence,” in Michael Cuntz, ed., Die Listen der Evidenz (The Cunning of Evidence) (Cologne: DuMont Press, Mediologie series, 2006): 86-106.
• Los documentales y el modernismo: 1919-1939, Comunicación y Sociedad, XIV, no. 2 (2002): 71-91.
• “Todellisuuden ja television rajamailla,” Lähikuva (Finland), no. 1, 2001: 6-24. Translation and reprint of ch. 3, “At the Limits of Reality (TV),” Blurred Boundaries.
• “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry, 27, 4 (2001): 580-610.
• “The Ten Stations of Spielberg’s Passion,” Jump Cut, 43 (2000): 9-11.