Bill Nichols

Bill Nichols
Nichols at a film seminar, the Central European University in Budapest, June 2013
Born	1942
Notable work	Introduction to documentary (2010) Engaging Cinema (2010) The Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Peter Forgacs (2011)

Introduction to documentary (2010) Engaging Cinema (2010)

Bill Nichols (born 1942) is an American film critic and theoretician best known for his pioneering work as founder of the contemporary study of documentary film. His 1991 book, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, applied modern film theory to the study of documentary film for the first time. It has been followed by scores of books by others and by additional books and essays by Nichols. The first volume of his two-volume anthology Movies and Methods (1976, 1985) helped to establish film studies as an academic discipline. Bill Nichols is Professor Emeritus in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University and Chair of the Documentary Film Institute advisory board.

Professor Nichols has lectured in numerous countries, served on film festival juries on different continents, consults regularly on a variety of filmmaking projects, and has published over 100 articles. He is former president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, a former advisor to the American Film Institute and has served as Department Chair in Canada and the United States. Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film describes his place within film studies as "the most significant documentary scholar in the world". His early work shared with other film scholars a degree of difficulty as it tried to apply elaborate theories to popular films but, as with the field generally, the intensity of theoretical investigation diminishes in his later work as the emotional impact of specific works takes on greater importance. Not a film historian in the traditional sense, Nichols has offered fresh views of historical assumptions but his main contribution has been to offer a conceptual framework for the study and production of documentary film.

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