Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media

by Bill Nichols

To what degree, Nichols asks, does ideology inform images in films, advertising, and other media? Does the cinema or any other sign system liberate or manipulate us? How can we as spectators know when the media are subtly perpetuating a specific set of values? To address these issues, the author draws from a variety of approachesâ Marxism, psycholanalysis, communication theory, semiotics, structuralism, the psychology of perception. Working with two interrelated theoriesâ ideology and image-systems, and ideology and principles of textual criticismâ Nichols shows how and why we make emotional investments in sign sytsems with an ideological context.

Genres: Film, Art, Theory, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1981

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was already an established canonical text of film theory when I read it as an undergraduate, over two decades ago. It remains influential, because it is one of relatively few books that can serve as a basic text on film analysis, carefully defining terms as it goes so that new students can, albeit with effort, keep up.

I remember being somewhat fascinated by Nichols’ style when I read it the first time. The Preface and Introduction, for example, each begin with very general observations: “Contradictions reveal, among other things, the passing of time” (p.viii) and “Images surround us” (p.1). He continues to discuss these generalizations for the next page, slowly circling in on a more specific interest, so that the reader learns to expect that the specifics given are illustrations of a broader theoretical or philosophical concern. This isn’t particularly unusual in theoretical writing, but it was new to me at the time, and I notice it instantly when I return to the text now.

The other thing that has changed for me over time is that I’ve seen more of the movies he’s talking about. When I first read it, I’m not sure I had even seen “The Birds,” or at least not all of it, but since then I’ve become familiar with “Blonde Venus,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” and other movies he works with. During that year, I worked on a paper (probably the longest I had written at that time) on Frederick Wiseman, no doubt based largely on Nichols’ discussion of “High School,” “Hospital,” and “Titticut Follies.” (I’m somewhat glad I no longer have that paper to remind me how bad a writer I was back then – although it might have the effect of making me more sympathetic to the struggles of modern-day undergraduates).

Nichols will turn a lot of people off, especially the sort of people who reject “film theory” as a category of analysis. Most filmmakers in America insist that theory just gets in the way of telling a story, that it is all mental masturbation, that it doesn’t have anything to do with practical considerations, and I’m sure that and far worse has been said about Nichols. His approach relies on Marx and especially on Freud, both of which are due for serious reconsideration by film theorists. He uses a lot of words which don’t appear in my dictionary, and demands a very attentive and careful reading to comprehend his arguments. I’d even go so far as to say that, while I enjoy the style and the writing, there are times when he gets caught up in his own discourse to the point he seems to lose sight of the subject of his analysis. But, maybe that’s the undergraduate inside me, speaking still.

All of which is to say that a 30-plus-year-old book won’t always seem cutting-edge and up-to-date, but it’s remarkable how much of Nichols still resonates in the twenty first century. I haven’t kept up with media studies, so I don’t know to what degree he is still being used or how far current film analysis has progressed past his position. But it seems to me that he serves as an excellent point of departure, even if we assume that film analysis can be better informed by current psychological understanding than by the theories formed 100 years ago in Vienna. If nothing else, Nichols provided a vocabulary and a syntax that film students will still benefit from learning.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 1 out of 5]

While it is something of a landmark text for film criticism, blending a Marxist socio-psychoanalytical approach that was novel at the time, the book is also a cumbersome collection of jargon and phraseology that weighs its own arguments down. By far, its best chapters are the analyses of Blonde Venus and The Birds. That said, I've often thought that Nichols and those like him live in a world of academic criticism that simply has no connection to or knowledge of filmmaking per se. His assumptions work better at the level of the story and the script but not with the final product of the completed film. This book and similar sorts are one reason I think that anyone publishing on films should first be required to make a film, even if it is only a five minute short. "Images" are less frequently driven by political and psychological motivations than they are by what is available, what makes a sequence fit, a scene work. Films are not so conspiratorial as Nichols thinks, either consciously or unconsciously, either driven by the confines of the system under which the produced or in reaction to that system. Some things he writes are just nonsense uttered by a man without a camera.