Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking. — Griffin Dunne
By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul. — Theodore Bikel
A lot of documentaries are biased - they leave out a lot of information. — Tim Pool
Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. — Walker Evans
In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. — Alfred Hitchcock
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. — Rod Serling
Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character. — Hedi Slimane
As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it. — Darren Aronofsky
I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten. — Spike Lee
Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed. — Wim Wenders
When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process. — Oliver Stone
Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them. — James Taylor
I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose. — W. Eugene Smith
Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever. — Hedy Lamarr
Short Documentaries Quotes
Right now I'm taking a break from hip-hop documentaries. But I would do it if things lined up. — Michael Rapaport
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph. — Dorothea Lange
We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second. — Colin Mochrie
Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? — Gene Siskel
Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week. — Jason Reitman
I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me. — Jack Brickhouse
Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity. — Spike Jonze
I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker. — Method Man
News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite. — Robert Greene
Are Documentaries In Quotes
A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a noisier photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not documentary in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces. — Simon Norfolk
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad. — Ken Burns
We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story. — Bradley Whitford
People are beginning to realize that it's important that we see animals in a natural state - but through film, through video, through documentaries, at wildlife preserves, and through other humanely protected ways, which don't involve... performing for us. — Montel Williams
One of the things I've been talking about with my critical writing and my own work is that these movies are seen differently in a theatrical space. It's very important to me. I edit films to be seen theatrically, like fiction material I've worked on like Listen Up Phillip or other documentaries. — Robert Greene
How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story? — Martha Rosler
Documentaries are a powerful and effective way of bridging the gap between worlds, breaking through to new audiences that wouldn't otherwise be engaged - in essence, not preaching to the choir. — Olivia Wilde
I want a documentary to crest by being voted on by 6000 people who are in the business of telling stories. — Sheila Nevins
Those are just some of the people whom we interviewed in the documentary, but that should provide you with a good sense of the credibility of the individuals who bolster the case that this administration lied us into a war. — Robert Greenwald
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility. — Bruce Jackson
Documentary Films Quotes
I teach at USC. I have a big class of 360 kids, only about a fifth of whom are film majors. I don't just show the Hollywood blockbusters. I show independent films, foreign films, documentaries. — Leonard Maltin
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind. — Salman Rushdie
I wouldn't do nudity in films. For me, personally... To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary. — Julia Roberts
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. — Ken Burns
As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I'd love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn't happened. — Hirokazu Koreeda
It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film. — Jonathan Demme
When I was 16, I made some little 35mm documentaries about the poor in London. I went round Notting Hill, which was a real slum in the 1950s, shooting film. — David Suchet
To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another. — Dennis Hopper
I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer. — Beau Bridges
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries. — Jeremy Northam
Documentary Photography Quotes
I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind
What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman. — Walker Evans
I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area. — Alex Webb
To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships. — Aaron Siskind
Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world. — Allan Sekula
[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan
I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography. — Sebastiao Salgado
I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography. — Joan Fontcuberta
I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another. — Walker Evans
I like to turn on the TV and watch whatever's on. Nick Kroll does that a lot. He doesn't watch important shows. He'll just turn on a documentary on Mia Hamm and watch it for an hour. Whatever's on, we watch. — John Mulaney
The testimony and the documentary evidence produced by the Government demonstrate that the Bell System had violated the antitrust laws in a number of ways over a lengthy period of time. — Harold H. Greene
A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization. — Max Weber
Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you're focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don't have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited. My way was to work, make my short... make my documentary... make my small films... use my own money... raise money myself... and stay shooting and focused on each project. — Ava DuVernay
For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate. — Giles Duley
In the US, the 50s and 60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering televison journalist Edward R Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme Hunger in America. — Naomi Wolf
I have a great career, and no matter what I am doing, a big blockbuster movie... or my small documentary, David Letterman will call and say I would like you to sit on my couch. — Rosie Perez
I have tried reading the Bible but that's a tough read there. I watch a lot of religious documentaries. I have a keen interest in religion for someone who's not religious. — Jim Jefferies
Independent documentary isnt beholden to some of the interests that the mainstream media are influenced by. Its a pathway to renegade, independent reporting in an in-depth, investigative fashion, and it can do so with a compassionate lens; it allows people to speak in a way that is more human than the mainstream media approach. — Josh Fox
My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity. — Yahoo Serious
When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War. — Trevor Nunn
The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace. — Rainn Wilson
I wouldn't call myself a geek, but I do sometimes teach Mommy and Daddy stuff about computers. And I do watch TV, but only informative programmes like the news and documentaries. — Adora Svitak
Live your life like there is a documentary crew following you around and you are analyzing your own behavior. — Joe Rogan
I watched a TV documentary about how animals are farmed, killed and prepared for us to eat. I saw all those cows and pigs and realized I couldn't be a part of it any more. It was horrible. I did some research to make sure I could still obtain enough protein to fight and, once satisfied that I could, I stopped. I'll never go back. — David Haye
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life. — Ethan Hawke
This elaborate Golden Dawn system became part of Crowley's own inner world ... He carried it further than even the Golden Dawn principals had envisaged. I know of nothing within the Order documentary that even hints at the kind of visionary and spiritual experience that Crowley managed to get out of it. — Israel Regardie
I'm Ready to Die without a Reasonable Doubt
Smoke Chronic and hit it Doggystyle before I go out.
Until they sign my Death Certificate, All Eyez on Me
I'm still at it, Illmatic, and that's The Documentary. — Jayceon Terrell Taylor
I am a Beyonce fan. I’m gonna watch her upcoming documentary because fortunately one of the TVs in our kitchen has closed captioning so I’ll be able to understand what she says. You know Beyonce can’t talk. She sounds like she has a fifth grade education. — Wendy Williams
You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected. — William Shatner
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind. — Walker Evans
I suppose the primary intention of a documentary photographer is to document facts. My work often does this but it is not the primary intention. My intention is to make the best pictorial image I can. — Richard Billingham
As I've grown older, the simple pleasure of sitting on the couch with someone you love and watching a documentary is about as good as it gets for me. — Paul Wesley
Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for themselves. I feel that the documentaries that I've been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our people to look at ourselves, at the situations, really facing it, and through that being able to make changes that really count for the future of our children to come. — Alanis Obomsawin
Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date. — Cilla Black
I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects — Boris Johnson
In Conclusion
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