Jean-Luc Godard Quotes
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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.
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To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
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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.
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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.
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Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
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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.
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More or less, I am always saying, 'Let's do what has not been done.'
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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!
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The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
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Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
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Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.
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I make film to make time pass.
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At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.
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Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
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Every edit is a lie.
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A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
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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.
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I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.
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All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.