Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard (born December 3, 1930) Paris, France.

French film director

Works: Alphaville, Breathless, My Life to Live, and many more

Sourced

• Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
  • "What Is Cinema?" Les Amis du Cinéma (Paris, October 1, 1952).

• The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
  • "Strangers on a Train," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, March 10, 1952).

• Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
  • "Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, Sept. 15, 1952).

• All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
  • Journal entry, May 16, 1991.

• 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.
  • Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1967, repr. 1970).

• 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.
  • Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

• Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
  • Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960).
  • [variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.

Attributed

• [When he received a pie in the face at the Cannes film festival in 1985, he licked pie off of his cigar and said]:
  "C'est ce qui arrive quand le cinema muet rencontre le cinema a textes."
  "This is what happened when silent movies met with talking pictures."

• I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I'm still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of 'Cahiers du Cinema.' The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.

• Movies are a world of Fragments.

• I make film to make time pass.

• Up to now...since shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution...most movie makers have been assuming that they know how to make movies. Just like a bad writer doesn't ask himself if he's really capable of writing a novel...he thinks he knows. If movie makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the movies, these accidents are called Oscars.

• I don't think you should feel about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can't kiss a movie.

• A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

• Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

• There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

• Every edit is a lie.

• What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.

• [speaking at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival about filmmaker Michael Moore]:
  Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.[Godard had not actually seen Michael Moore's film at the time.]

• "To be or not to be. That's not really a question."

• "This is not a just image, this is just an image."

See also

• Films
• Quotes about Television
• Quotes about the Movies

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