Imperdonable Documentary Quotes

I think everything can be painted because painting can change reality; but everything cannot be photographed and the photographer often comes home empty-handed, with images which (often) have a documentary interest, but which rarely go further than that. One has to be completely available, very tenacious and admit that many subjects won't give any results ... and a miracle sometimes happens, without warning. ~ Martine Franck

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 often used to turn off the television whenever there was yet another documentary on National Socialism. Yeah, yeah, it was dreadful, I said to myself, but we know it was dreadful.... The equation ' National Socialism equals Holocaust' had always led me to the point where I thought, oh yes, horror. Horror ticked off like a piece of prep; horror as ritualised as a victim's story on television or at the cinema. ~ Stephen Lebert

I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed ... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS ... a little documentary. ~ Asif Kapadia

Truth is stranger than fiction," as the old saying goes. When I watch a documentary, I can't help crying and then I think to myself, "Fiction can't compete with this."
But when I mentioned this to a veteran manga artist friend of mine he said that "fiction brings salvation to characters in stories that would otherwise have no salvation at all."
His words strengthened the conviction of my manga spirit. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

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

NO greater love has a husband for his wife than to watch a 2hr documentary on an elite ballet competition. ~ Mark Venturini

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

Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them. ~ Pamela Yates

You made a point about proof. In this sort of history we do nt have proof ... Yet ... the incontrovertibility of the evidence can be plain even when it is not documentary or complete. ~ Robert Conquest

One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges. ~ Brian Lindstrom

One night, Tim stumbled across a documentary called Manufacturing Consent. After viewing it, he found some writing online by its subject, Noam Chomsky, and as a result began to feel that there wasn't really a point to anything, that free will was an illusion, and that the things most people invested time and energy in were systems of control designed by those who sought to manipulate the general populace ~ Chad Kultgen

So you're Zach." Townsend didn't even try to hide the judgement in his voice as he looked Zach up and down in some sort of silent but dangerous examination.
Zach huffed but smiled. "so you're Townsend."
The two of them stared for a long time, wordless. It felt like I was watching a documentary on the Nature Channel, something about alpha males in the wild. ~ Ally Carter

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

Like theatre, crafting a documentary film takes tremendous commitment, patience and passion. ~ Dori Berinstein

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways. ~ Dana Spiotta

You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating. ~ Thom Powers

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Do I believe the execution will work out? Les Moonves said yes to Survivor based partly upon my show Eco-Challenge. He liked my way of filming outdoors. It was the first use of helicopters on a documentary with the gyro-stabilized lenses. And a certain beauty of filming, allowing the drops to fall from a leaf into a puddle, allowing a spider to weave a web. Taking the breath to allow that to happen rather than showing scene after scene. ~ Scott Raab

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography's limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating. ~ Taryn Simon

A film is not a documentary. And what's wonderful about film is that it's a real provocation for people. I never, ever see film as being an absolute version of the truth. ~ Cate Blanchett

One of the top challenges is the fact that you are dealing with survivors. Every time you deal with a documentary film subject it is fraught with obvious minefields but when you are dealing with a population that is severely traumatized and trying to recover from that trauma there is an extra level of vigilance and care and attention that has to be implemented all the time at every level. ~ Amy Ziering

The best documentaries are independent. They don't exist to serve interests, philanthropic or otherwise. ~ Nick Fraser

I'm a huge fan of the Ken Burns documentary style, big time. I love documentaries full stop. I'm a big documentary fan. That's my reality. I don't like reality TV. I like it like that. ~ Phil Morris

The documentary we are working on is about my mother, Bev Umehara, for whom our film company, Bev's Girl Films, is named after. It is a passion project that I have wanted to make since her unexpected passing in 1999. The film is about my mother's calling which came late in life, at 47, when she made the sudden transformation from a humble hardworking secretary and mother of four, into a labor activist, a respected union leader, and a role model for rank-and-file workers, women of color, and for all Asian Pacific Americans. ~ Garth Kravits

When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival. ~ Rory Kennedy

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.) ~ Martha Rosler

If you watch a stretch of TV for a few hours, there is a good chance you'll hear me on some commercial or in some documentary or on a cartoon as some voice of a character. ~ Henry Rollins

There is so much investment in it of people's labor time that it will never make money. But there are other documentaries that you might make that are sort of on assignment for television that turn around in three to six months. Then the margin can be much be better for you because you're not spending three-and-a-half years on it. So I think if you're doing documentary films, that's sort of the way to look at it. ~ Liz Garbus

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

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film. ~ Marshall Curry

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions. ~ Edward Norton

It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society. ~ Sally Crawford

If you care about the 2012 election and value the voices of regular Americans who lost hope in their hope and change candidate, this is one documentary you won't want to miss. ~ Jedediah Bila

I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer. ~ Catherine Opie

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another. ~ Dennis Hopper

I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it. ~ Harvey Weinstein

We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second. ~ Colin Mochrie

Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film. ~ Philippe Cousteau, Jr.

Spitz and Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock ~ Andrew Gentes

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

I operate the camera, I always do it when I'm the director, and I like to approach it as a documentary, finding the images based on what happens, as it happens. ~ Benjamin Avila

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them. ~ Charlotte Wood

I like this documentary, starring her in captivity, better. ~ Jay Clark

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

She'd seen a documentary once, on cult leaders, and the traits that made them so effective. One of the most important features was a commanding presence. Too many people thought that meant being loud, but in truth, it meant someone who didn't need to be loud. Someone who could command an audience without ever raising their voice. ~ Victoria Schwab

In fiction film, there are so many trappings - money, glory, champagne and supermodels - that attract the wolves. But in documentary film, there's none of that, so the wolves stay away. The only people who make docs are people who are curious about other people and just like making documentaries. ~ Marshall Curry

Atlantis was one name for an ancient civilization that went through a terrible catastrophe and that we now have the opportunity to not repeat the same mistakes. We have the opportunity to use our technology responsibly and to steward the earth rather than steer it into its own destruction. ~ David Wilcock