Frederick Wiseman Quotes

I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.

No one loves an archive better than I do. I can smell a good one half-a-block away - all that brittle papyrus dust is music to my nostrils.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

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.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

On 'Senna,' it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.

A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

The suffragettes were quite strategic about documenting their events, and there were some good photos. And we developed a roll of film that had never been developed before!

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

It's funny how sometimes historians sneer at journalists, yet they depend on us in the future for the material that they mine. You realize that some of the stories wouldn't have been told if you hadn't gotten to them. There is that sense of capturing a moment that was just about to go over the horizon.

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.

Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, tanquam tabula naufragii: when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

So I'm happiest when I'm working with artists and writers, and involved in stories, whether we're talking about animation or movies or comics or television.