I personally can't define the difference between a documentary and a narrative film […] one day when I was wondering, What exactly is a documentary, as opposed to the other kinds of movies that we make? I finally decided that if you just attach the camera to the top of a bull's horns and let him loose in a field for a whole day, at the end of the day you might have a documentary. But there's still a catch here, because we've selected the location and the type of lens that we want.

Every film is a documentary. Even the most whimsical of fictions gives evidence of the culture that produced it and reproduces the likenesses of the people who perform within it […] we could say that there are two kinds of film: (1) documentaries of wish-fulfillment and (2) documentaries of social representation.

With the proliferation of films in documentary form over the course of the past two decades, no one is quite sure what the term documentary means anymore. The popular sense of the word in Japan has degenerated so that it is used to refer to television gossip shows and the dokyumento shelves at video stores.

The attitude of inquiry provided by a poetics is particularly apropos for the documentary insofar as poetics has […] occupied an unstable position at the juncture of science and aesthetics, structure and value, truth and beauty. Documentary film is itself the site of much equivocation around similar axes given nonfiction's too-frequently presumed debt to the signified at the expense of the signifier's play. It is ‘film of fact’, ‘nonfiction’, the realm of information and exposition rather than diegetic employment or imagination – in short, at a remove from the creative core of the cinematic art.