Letter To Jane

Find here Chapter 6 from Nichols' Intro to Documentary. This is where he lays out his taxonomy of documentary film in a more concise form. You have already encountered this in the early articles by Nichols you read at the beginning of the semester (here) however this is a good review for you.
At this point you should also be done reading the Ellis/McLane book up to and including Chapter 15: English Language Documentary in the 1970s. At this point and in view of the midterm our run through the main post-war documentary forms should be complete up to the 1980s and the advent of video and you should be familiar with it all: Television Docs, Social Realism and British Free Cinema, Cinema Veritè/Direct Cinema, the Deconstructed Structural documentary of the Dziga Vertov Group and the militant documentary movements of the 'newsreel collectives' of the late sixties and early seventies in the US.
Please watch the interview with Jean-Luc Godard below. It is a good introduction to his way of thinking in the early sixties and in the procedures of the work he did with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group. He speaks of Tout Va Bien, a 'fiction' film he made with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, as a more politically effective reflection on the political struggles in France compared to a straight documentary film like Coup Pour Coup by Marin Karmitz. Tout Va Bien is the film at the origin of the short Letter To Jane which we will be screening and discussing in class.