Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

How non-fiction film practice has always blurred the boundaries between itself, fiction, and experimental film and video.

About the Author

BILL NICHOLS is Professor of Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. He has edited two widely used anthologies, Movies and Methods I and II, and is the author of Ideology and the Image and Representing Reality.

Awards
Winner of Choice Magazine Outstanding Reference/Academic Book Award 1996.



Book Information
ISBN 9780253209009
Author Bill Nichols
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 367g