John Grierson
John Grierson
John Griersonwas a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty's Moana...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth26 April 1898
training world lines
The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter.
art believe cinema
We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself can be exploited in a new and vital art form
real taken believe
We believe that the materials and the stories taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.
use cinema looks
I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.
art mirrors hammers
Art is not a mirror but a hammer.
art powerful information
And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.
philosophy school pursuit-of-happiness
Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.
real profound phrases
In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound