Content area
Full Text
Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. University of California Press, 2016. 263 pages.
Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary is a compilation of eighteen articles, reviews, and letters written throughout Bill Nichols's career focusing on the theoretical problems associated with documentary film. The selections included, revised for this publication, are appropriately categorized by section and flow seamlessly as a comprehensive book rather than an edited anthology. Nichols addresses issues ranging from content and form to ethics and politics, the latter of which is presented brilliantly in his final section of the book, which juxtaposes one of his earliest writings on the san Francisco and New York Newsreel organizations-originally published in the late 1960s as a masters thesis-with a more recent publication focusing on the institutional and ideological frameworks that documentary filmmakers often fall victim to in the digital age, indirectly imploring future filmmakers to adopt a more radicalized vision and documentary practice. But Nichols makes more compelling arguments in the first half of the book, providing a closer look at documentary form and its relation to the avant-garde, as well as an update on his seminal work from 1983, "The Voice of Documentary."
Nichols treats the expository mode of documentation, most commonly associated with "voice of God" narration, as equivalent to classical Hollywood narrative. Much like the conventions that define classical Hollywood cinema (eye-level camera angles, continuity...