All quotes (So Far)

 

A: Martin Scorsese interview

1. "Narrative film making is a pre-scripted movie with actors, documentary film making is capturing reality."
2. "To record is documentary to interpret is dramatic fiction."
3. In relation to previous quote, "Sometimes, you do both."

B: Anne Fischel: engagement in documentary

1. "Documentaries awaken desires not just for information but for insight, understanding and intimacy,"
2. "You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your own juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it."
3. "The documentary film maker is defined as an outsider, a stranger seeking entry into someone else's world"
4. "In making documentaries, film makers must observe events and make some sense of of them. they move from observation (gathering information or data) to description, formulating a coherent narrative structure to convey what they have observed.
5. They organize that information, integrating and synthesising it into a coherent picture of the world.

C: John Grierson: Principles o documentary

1. "Documentaries are "the creative view of actuality."
2. "However it be shot through vigour of lawrencian poetry, it must always fail to develop a form adequate to the more immediate material of the modern world."
3. "they describe, and even expose, but, in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal.
4. Documentaries use "Natural material," nothing like "fake backgrounds," but they rely more on the natural aesthetic of life.

D: Bill Nichols: Introduction to documentary

1.  "Documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform their roles."
2.  "Documentaries tell us how things change and who produces these changes."

E: David Bordwell: narrative as a formal system

1. "Narrative forms is most common in fictional films, but it can appear in all other basic types. For instance, Documentaries often employ a narrative form."
2. "Narrative is the way humans make sense of the world."

F: Sheila Curran Bernard: Documentary story telling: the drama of      real life

1. "You might set up a camera to record a "day in the life" of a local barbershop and end up with some interesting footage, but until it's been shaped and given meaning by the filmmaker - until it tells a story in some form - it's not a documentary." 
2. "You cant combine the facts, to create something that's false" (I can go on to talk about mediation)
3. "If you give away too much information too soon, important details will be lost or their significance missed." (Spinal tap, stone henge scene) 
4. "Allowing the viewer the satisfaction of "getting it" and enjoying what's known as an "aha!" moment" (Spinal tap, stone henge scene)
5. "In documentary as in drama, you need to collapse real time into its essence."
6. "The amount of time you give to a scene is also important."

22 Quotes