Words matter. These are the best Jean-Luc Godard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I write and film history; I don’t make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.
A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.
Through most of my career, I’ve made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes’ work for the crew – and keep the three hours to myself for thought.
At the cinema, we do not think – we are thought.
Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
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.
When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them.
The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
I know nothing of life except through the cinema.
I am trying to change the world.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
We once believed we were auteurs, but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.
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.
To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.
I want to be together with everyone else but stay lonely.
I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
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.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
Every edit is a lie.
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.
You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.
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.
