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Title: Bill Nichols should not be allowed to write
Review: Bill Nichols is full of words and empty of thought. You need a machete to slash through the tangled sentences in this book, and what you'll find beneath are simplistic, flawed ideas that aren't developed but buried under more verbiage. Nichols stitches suffixes and prefixes to ordinary nouns, creating monsters like "situatedness," "hyperrationality," "reconceptualization," "polyvocality," "relationality," "talismanic"(!), and the pseudo-literate's favorite word of all: "juxtaposition." Each of those words costs as much time to understand as a whole chapter of Erik Barnouw's book (which is succinct, informative and even humorous). Mr. Nichols should be sealed in a cave and his books slung into outer space, for they pollute the body of film knowledge. Don't buy "Representing Reality" unless you want to know how confused Mr. Nichols's reality is.
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