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
Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking. — Griffin Dunne
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
A lot of documentaries are biased - they leave out a lot of information. — Tim Pool
In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. — Alfred Hitchcock
I think it is very important that films make people look at what they've forgotten. — Spike Lee
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
Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever. — Hedy Lamarr
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
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
Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images. — Steven Bochco
Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires. — Nicolas Winding Refn
I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films. — Anthony Minghella
A film is one small voice among other large ones. The film is a tiny part of the discourse. You do what you can but under no illusions of what a film can do. — Ken Loach
Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business! — Roger Corman
Short Documentary Films Quotes
I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose. — W. Eugene Smith
Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle. — Robert Bresson
Films are getting expensive by the day. They are making more money by the day. — Rakesh Jhunjhunwala
Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami. — Jean-Luc Godard
There are no rules in filmmaking — Frank Capra
The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. — Stan Brakhage
Pain is temporary, film is forever. — Michael J. Fox
I want to make a film about a factory worker. — Richard Linklater
Documentary Films Image Quotes
I'm not interested in a realistic look - not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.
Documentary Filmmaking Quotes
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
News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite. — Robert Greene
I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end to this type of filmmaking. — Krzysztof Kieslowski
Great moments are born from great opportunities.
My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries. — Lasse Hallstrom
My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations. — Jamie Wyeth
Thhe essence of documentary filmmaking is how you manipulate the material to create an emotional impact, as opposed to just delivering information. — Richard Ray Perez
To make a great film need three things - the script, the script and the script.
Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office. — Howard Shore
I began filmmaking in high school, at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. My first documentary was about a dysfunctional obese middle-aged carpet cleaner named Bill, who lived with his Mom, and his love affair with Anna, a drug-addicted prostitute. I made that when I was 16. — Yony Leyser
Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them. — Pamela Yates
Film Quotes
If you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew. — Pocahontas
Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light. — J. K. Rowling
There are a lot of good books around. People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it? — Lemmy Kilmister
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. — John Hughes
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. — Clark Gable
One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it. — Julie Taymor
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow. — Imogen Cunningham
Drama is life with the dull bits left out. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. — Alfred Hitchcock
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
Documentaries Quotes
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
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
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
Right now I'm taking a break from hip-hop documentaries. But I would do it if things lined up. — Michael Rapaport
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
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
My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity. — Yahoo Serious
Documentary Photography Quotes
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph. — Dorothea Lange
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
Films And Movies Quotes
And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography. — Gus Van Sant
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti. — Anthony Hopkins
We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy. — J. K. Rowling
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti — Thomas Harris
The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion. — Pedro Almodovar
A government institution called the Finnish Film Foundation funds filmmaking there, and I wrote several screenplays but never got any money. They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them. — Renny Harlin
Since Star Wars, that film's success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have very interesting roles. — Faye Dunaway
Everybody wants blockbusters. I like to see a few pictures now and then that have to do with people and have relationships, and that's what I want to do films about. I don't want to see these sci-fi movies, and I don't want to do one of those. I don't understand it. — James Garner
You see, in this world, there's two kinds of people, my friend - those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig. — Clint Eastwood
That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style. — Lawrence Kasdan
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
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
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
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
Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? — Gene Siskel
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
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
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
I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films. — Jonathan Demme
Ten years ago I was not heavily involved in the film world but on reflection it was a boom time with the mineral boom happening, so there was immense growth for industrial training films, documentaries to do with the mining, and the outback world. — Ann Macbeth
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
You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry. — Sayings
Making an independent documentary film is so hard that usually, the usual model is that your film becomes a model for advocacy, so you can enlist that support group and get as much juice out of your film as possible. That's just practically, financially, what you need to do. — Tim Hetherington
Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things. — Ruth Ozeki
In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller. — Garth Stein
I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it. — Michael Rapaport
In documentary films, being able to be a storytelling and embrace film as an art form - while being very clearly connected in trying to help make the world a better place - is really important to me. — James Redford
There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him. — Finn Jones
A good film is also a documentary — Eric Rohmer
I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films. — Colin Farrell
A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen. — Roger Ebert
We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift. — Pirjo Honkasalo
I wouldn't do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary. — Julia Roberts
This is indeed not only relevant to Documentary but is evident is most type of film making. The film often mirrors the experience, understanding and politics of the director. — Ben Edwards
I never wanted to be a film director but after this experience I really loved it. I would love to do more documentaries but it's difficult to find backing for them. — Marc Singer
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films. — Walter Salles
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility. — Bruce Jackson
The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things. — Bruce Jackson
I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself. — William Shatner
Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them. — Daniel Berrigan
When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda. If I wanted to do that, I'd make documentaries. — Norman Jewison
I first started making films - this is my first feature, but I was making shorts - I was actually freelancing as a day job at The New York Times as an art director. I actually worked with Bill Cunningham and really soon after I met him, I thought, "Oh my God, he's a perfect subject for a documentary." — Richard Press
In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story. — Joshua Oppenheimer
I just like voicing films in general. I do a lot of documentary work and it's a short hop really to narrating a character, especially if you're on film and you're there in a visual way. It sounds obvious, but voicing an animation really focuses you on the way that you're communicating through your voice. It's a very specific ability that you need to be able to have in order to pitch it just right. — Mark Strong
A lot of documentaries have been made very quickly, but I think they're like frogs in an ecosystem: They're harbingers. Film is always two or three years behind, because it takes so long to write a script, get financing, and get it made. It just takes a while. But I think it's coming. It has to. — Alexander Payne
I try to be after something that is deeply reverberating inside of our souls, some deep echo from - even from prehistory. What makes us humans? How do we communicate? Where are we going at this moment? Something for an audience where they can step outside of themselves, where they can be almost like in ecstasy of truth, some sort of deep illumination. And that's what I'm trying in documentaries and in feature films. — Werner Herzog
In Conclusion
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