Quotes

Bill Nicholls Introduction to Documentary

• "If documentaries represent issues and aspects, qualities and problems found in the historical world, they can be said to speak about this world through both sound and images."
• "documentaries become one voice among many that give shape to our world"
• "For every documentary there are at least three stories that intertwine: the filmmaker's, the film's and the audience's."
•  "Documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform their roles."
• "the filmmaker shapes this story into a proposal or perspective on the historical world directly, adhering to known facts, rather than creating a fictional allegory."
• "many documentaries violate any specific definition"
• "documentaries are not documents"

BFI Screenonline

• "Sacrifice factual accuracy to dramatic storytelling"
• "Documentary and drama cannot be viewed as mutually exclusive, since the assumption that documentary is objective and innately factual is misguided

Digital distribution, participatory culture and the transmedia documentary by Chuck Tyron

• "films seek to address audiences largely with the goal of producing social or political change"
• "modes of representation that Bill Nichols (1991: p. 3) has associated with 'the discourses of sobriety,' which operate under the assumption that non-fiction films 'can and should alter the world itself, they can effect action and entail consequences.'"

MediaKnowAll

• "Documentary texts are supposedly those which aim to document reality, attempting veracity in their depiction of people, places and events. However, the process of mediation means that this is something of a oxymoron, it being impossible to re-present reality without constructing a narrative that may be fictional in places."

On documentary filmmaking by Helga Reidemeister

• "Just the presence of filmmakers and their tools immediately changes reality. Unavoidably filmmakers cannot record reality "like it is.""
• "the filmmaker waits patiently until something happens "on its own" in front of the camera. The filmmaker records this process without interference or provocation. Presumably (s)he discovers reality without distortion."

New Frontiers in American Documentary Film

• John Grierson labeled the non-fiction film Nanook of the North as a "documentary" because it was an example of the "creative treatment of actuality."
• Robert Flaherty believed it was acceptable to add fiction to documentaries, as long as the effect on the audience was real. It was content that mattered most and not the method. - disagree with the add fiction 
• A documentary teaches at the same time it appeals to the heart 
• It is important to remember that although one of the purposes of the documentary is to present reality, it is constructed and can only be a representation of reality. By using specific techniques to form the production, documentarians can make their footage seem like the absolute truth and control to a large extent how the film is received by the viewer.

MacCann, Richard Dyer. The People's Films: A Political History of United States Government Motion Pictures. New York: Hastings House, 1973. (11).

• The important thing is not the authenticity of the materials, but the authenticity of the result

Genre is dead - long live genre A critique by Rob McInnes

• "My argument is that it's simply nonsense to claim that genres possess clear, stable and identifiable boundaries."
• "Ultimately, perhaps we need to remember that the concept of genre is a little like stereotyping. Once you start investigating real people in all their complexity, stereotypes tend to fall apart; similarly, once you start analysing a complex media text, generic labels become fairly meaningless"

Confronting Reality: An Introduction to Television Documentary by R. W. Kilkorn

• "Empathy, our own identification with the figures on the screen, is a powerful means not only of engaging our attention, but also of getting us to conspire with the film makers into surrendering our disbelief" - In catfish we choose to not even consider the fact that it might be fake as we have grew such a connection with the social actors that we wouldn't question that any of their story is a lie.

Oxford Dictionaries

• "Verisimilitude-The appearance of being true or real"- Appearance being the key word as appearance just means that not have to actually have to be that thing it just has to be a representation, just has to appear to be like it. Therefore documentaries may not actually be reality but will make sense.