MY PRACTICE: INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

I have at times found it hard to understand exactly what may practice is. Is it documentary, fictional, narrative and character or art. If anything the MA in Arts Practice has confused this even further. I feel I am all of the above and that being pigeon holed as one is to the detriment of me and my work and I see no problem. If I had to plump for one though I guess it is the documentary form that most excites me.

I decided to collect here any quotes I really liked about the form and whilst doing so saw that the best documentaries are all of the areas I have been looking at and the very best often touch on all of them. Anyway I actually found this research quite consoling so with no more ado here are the quotes.

Nick Frazer: Editor of the BBC Storyville Strand
"I know this may sound like warmed-over existentialism, but this is the conclusion I’ve come to after sitting watching doc after doc, in an effort to write a non-academic, fan’s-notes book about the form. The docs I like are irremediably hybrid – a mixture of authorial personality, cod epistemology, appropriated or created history and whatever seems current and interesting. Sometimes they are polemical, sometimes tinged with fictional contrivance. The only rule is that they should have no rules. They should be, rather than tell. They should make the worst things comprehensible. No documentary should be without some aesthetic bliss, even if it is tamped down, minimal, barely noticeable. So yes, documentaries do matter, I think they really do."

Werner Herzog: Filmmaker
“Our entire sense of reality has been called into question. But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable. But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.”