Jean-Luc Godard Quotes
-
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.
-
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
-
In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!
-
I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.
-
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
-
Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.
-
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.
-
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
-
The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.
-
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.
-
More or less, I am always saying, 'Let's do what has not been done.'
-
I think the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.
-
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
-
Every edit is a lie.
-
At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.
-
Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
-
Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.
-
The Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.
-
I make film to make time pass.
-
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
-
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
-
American pictures usually have no subject, only a story. A pretty woman is not a subject. Julia Roberts doing this and that is not a subject.
-
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
-
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.