Performative Documentary Quotes

#1. What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.' #Quote by Errol Morris

#2. [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) #Quote by Pierre Mac Orlan

#3. We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary. #Quote by Michael Moore

#4. She once watched a documentary and learned that the brain was 2 percent of a human's body weight, and it was a testament to the neck and the spinal cord that it managed to hold the whole thing upright. #Quote by Tracy Ewens

#5. ...the performative online biliousness that has come to be known as trolling... #Quote by Glen Weldon

#6. People aren't familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew. #Quote by Mark Zupan

#7. 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. #Quote by Garth Kravits

#8. Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Grandad's Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1)Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power. #Quote by Anya Von Bremzen

#9. There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good. #Quote by John Benjamin Hickey

#10. And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure. #Quote by Maximilian Schell

#11. For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life. #Quote by John Palfrey

#12. A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [ ... ] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images ... ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own. #Quote by Mary Ellen Mark

#13. The Mars Committee and its various offshoots have struggled consistently over the years on behalf of the public interest. Their work is presented with great documentary force in Dr. Stanley V McDaniel's 1993 book, The McDaniel Report, published by North Atlantic Books of Berkeley, California. This report should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of public science. #Quote by Whitley Strieber

#14. I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was ... appalling ... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did. #Quote by Laura Wade

#15. 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. #Quote by Jeremy Northam

#16. When I'm able to bring together the two worlds that I love so much - film and TV - is a documentary feature, it's nirvana! #Quote by Dori Berinstein

#17. I think the beauty of documentary work is that it's a mystery - you never know where it's going to lead you. You start out with some notion of it, but it's very different from a script. A script you write, you shoot against, and you know what the story is going to be. There's always the element of surprise, but the surprise comes from performance, from something that's improvised, it comes from someone who sees it inside an already determined framework. In documentary, it's never determined. It's never the same, and affords enormous possibility. #Quote by Gail Levin

#18. A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make. #Quote by Dan Trachtenberg

#19. 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. #Quote by David Haye

#20. I've been wanting to do a documentary on the true heart of the groupie ever since I was one. The groupie is just a girl who loves music and loves to be around the people who make it. She is the fan that takes it to the next level to experience the whole shebang, #Quote by Pamela Des Barres

#21. What's your pick?"
"Jesus Camp"
"Never heard of it, Is it a slasher flick?"
'It's a documentary." We all laughed but he didn't seem to be joking. "I'm telling you, if that movie doesn't scare you, nothing will."
Jared looked at hi in astonishment. "A documentary about religion?"
"It's not about religion. It's about fanaticism. Not the same thing."
Angelo was looking thoughtful, and I knew we'd have a copy by the end of the month. #Quote by Marie Sexton

#22. Spitz and Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock #Quote by Andrew Gentes

#23. War crimes, you say?

No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified.

I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return.

Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters.

So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen.

But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera.

The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen. #Quote by Thisuri Wanniarachchi

#24. This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason. #Quote by Martin Bashir

#25. I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else's footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art…which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else's - every image, every cut… What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive. I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn't have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn't want to miss a thing. I feel so lucky to have known her. And to all young filmmakers: you need to watch Agnès Varda's pictures. #Quote by Martin Scorsese

#26. Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too. #Quote by J.L. Granatstein

#27. I'd love to direct commercials on Caribbean beacheswith luscious women rubbing on suntan lotion, but all I get arethese documentary-type things. #Quote by Michael Apted

#28. I'm Min's fairy godmother, Charm Boy,' Liza said, frowning down at him. 'And if you don't give her a happily ever after, I'm going to come back and beat you to death with a snow globe.'
What happened to "bibbity bobbity boo"?' Cal asked Min.
That was Disney, honey,' Min said. 'It wasn't a documentary. #Quote by Jennifer Crusie

#29. I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy. #Quote by Scott Ritter

#30. documentary The Invisible War (which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and #Quote by Nancy Sherman

#31. You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing. #Quote by Imogen Cunningham

#32. I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.' #Quote by Rory Kennedy

#33. Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs. #Quote by Sally Mann

#34. I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker. #Quote by Method Man

#35. I wasn't interested at all in doing a documentary. I was not a public figure. #Quote by Iris Apfel

#36. Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. #Quote by Denise Duhamel

#37. All of these years that I have been singing, no one has done a documentary about my music as far as I'm concerned. #Quote by Ruth Brown

#38. Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency. #Quote by Roger Ebert

#39. Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can't really have a slant; financially, you can't have a slant on the end goals. #Quote by Amy J. Berg

#40. It is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated. #Quote by Jorge Amado

#41. In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. #Quote by Tom Brokaw