BILL NICHOLS
M.A. Coordinator
Professor

Education/Professional Preparation

  • 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 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

  • 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:

  • “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.
  • "Children, Art, Sex, Pornography: Jennifer Montgomery's Art for Teach­ers of Chil­dren," co-authored with Gerald Peary, Camera Obscura, no. 39 (1999): 35-51.
  • "Foreword," Barry Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds., Docu­menting the Documentary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.)
  • "Dislocating Ethnographic Film: In and Out of Africa and Issues of Cultural Repre­sentation," American Anthropologist, 99, no. 4 (1997): 810-824.
  • "The Unseen Jury," University of San Francisco Law Review, 30, no. 4 (1996): 1055-64.
  • "Maya Deren: Her Radical Aspirations and Influences on the Film Avant-Garde," Essay and Program Notes for a Film Series, San Francisco Muse­um of Modern Art, April - May, 1996