"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."-Joseph Conrad, 1897

“After a long silence, Yazzie turned to Worth and asked, in Navajo, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any harm?’ Worth replied no, to which Yazzie responded, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any good?’ Again, Worth replied no.
[Yazzie] thought this over, then, looking around at us he said, ‘Then why make movies?” —Sol Worth, 1972

"We do not demand that a field ethnologist write with the skill of a novelist or a poet, although we do indeed accord disproportionate attention to those who do. It is equally inappropriate to demand that filmed behavior have the earmarks of a work of art. We can be grateful when it does, and we can cherish those rare combinations of artistic ability and scientific fidelity that have given us great ethnographic films. But I believe that we have absolutely no right to waste our breath and our resources demanding them. That we do is the unfortunate outcome of both the European tradition of the overriding importance of originality in the arts and the way in which the camera has replaced the artist's brush and so developed film as an art form." -Margaret Mead, Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words

"That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."-Susan Sontag, On Photography

“This film is research. The context of this research is Paris. It is not a fictional film. This research concerns real life. This is not a documentary film. This research does not aim to describe; it is an experiment lived by its authors and its actors. This is not strictly speaking, a sociological film. Sociological film researches society. It is an ethnological film in the strong sense of the term; it studies mankind.”-Edgar Morin, synopis for authorization to film Chronicle of a Summer with Jean Rouch