Bill Nichols’ documentary modes offer one of the most useful — and most debated — ways to group documentaries. Nichols is a respected American documentary film theorist who developed these modes in several of his books, including Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary and Introduction to Documentary, now in its third edition. This post…
Tag: Bill Nichols
Who Defines a Documentary?
Documentary theorist Bill Nichols outlines four groups that define a documentary: “An institutional framework” “A community of practitioners” “A corpus of texts” “A constituency of viewers” An Institutional Framework Institutional frameworks refer to anyone involved in the distribution and support of documentary. They can be divided into two sub-groups. 1. The first group includes those…