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Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement La Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave.

Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation." As a result of such argument, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV." He is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s; his approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him arguably the most influential director of the French New Wave. Along with showing knowledge of film history through homages and references, several of his films expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy.

Since the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, and a Marxist perspective.

In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top-ten directors of all time . He is said to have "created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award, but did not attend the award ceremony. Godard's films have inspired many directors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

From his father, he is the cousin of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, current President of Peru.

✵ 3. December 1930
Jean-Luc Godard photo
Jean-Luc Godard: 32   quotes 6   likes

Famous Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

“Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Cited in: Paul Bowden, Telling It Like It Is https://books.google.nl/books?id=w8_p1eGVj8gC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=%22Art+attracts+us+only+by+what+it+reveals+of+our+most+secret+self%22+%22jean+luc+godard%22&source=bl&ots=2zIpIhvB_1&sig=uImQSWu8ATehPk0hAhfck-ZowJc&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjwydLuqp_LAhVhDJoKHdrjACcQ6AEIUjAG#v=onepage&q=%22Art%20attracts%20us%20only%20by%20what%20it%20reveals%20of%20our%20most%20secret%20self%22%20%22jean%20luc%20godard%22&f=false, 2011, p. 182
Source: "What Is Cinema?" Les Amis du Cinéma (Paris, October 1, 1952).

“To be or not to be. That's not really a question.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“One can enjoy existence, not life.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes about thinking

“Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it.
- Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“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!”

Jean-Luc Godard

from The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994. David Sterritt

“[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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

from Los Angeles Free Press, March 22, 1968. Gene Youngblood

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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

Jean-Luc Godard

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

“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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

ibid.
Cited in: passionriver.com http://www.passionriver.com/blog/previous/32, 12-3-2013

“To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.”

Jean-Luc Godard

ibid.
Cited in: David Brancaleone, The Interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker into Contemporary Visual Art https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/issue-30-spring-2012-godard-is/the-interventions-of-jean-luc-godard-and-chris-marker/, 2012, closeupfilmcentre.com

“I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Cited in: Tim Concannon, Praising Arizona http://www.blackmassmovies.com/docs/Praising%20Arizona.pdf, March 2013
Source: Los Angeles Free Press, March 15, 1968. Gene Youngblood

Time

“The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Cited in: Fayek S. Hourani, Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul: A Handbook of Transcultural Proverb and Sayings https://books.google.nl/books?id=ASN8DVH2AgYC&pg=PA169&dq=%22The+truth+is+that+there+is+no+terror+untempered+by+some+great+moral+idea%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjR3svWq5_LAhXDJg8KHY3vBpcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20truth%20is%20that%20there%20is%20no%20terror%20untempered%20by%20some%20great%20moral%20idea%22&f=false, 2012, p. 169
Source: "Strangers on a Train," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, March 10, 1952).

Truth , Idea

“Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.”

Jean-Luc Godard

ibid.
Cited in: Ideas, not plots, inspire Jean-Luc Godard http://www.csmonitor.com/1994/0803/03121.html, csmonitor.com, August 3, 1994

Past

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Cited in: Jerry White, Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville https://books.google.nl/books?id=QpXZAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT136&dq=%22All+you+need+for+a+movie+is+a+gun+and+a+girl%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjB-5vnrJ_LAhXCLQ8KHZ1yCTgQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22All%20you%20need%20for%20a%20movie%20is%20a%20gun%20and%20a%20girl%22&f=false, 2013
Source: Journal entry, May 16, 1991.

Girl

“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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Source:"Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, Sept. 15, 1952).
Cited in: Fayek S. Hourani, Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul: A Handbook of Transcultural Proverb and Sayings https://books.google.nl/books?id=ASN8DVH2AgYC&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=%22Beauty+is+composed+of+an+eternal,+invariable+element+whose+quantity+is+extremely+difficult+to+determine%22&source=bl&ots=JwrnY2eVbL&sig=1XbUReB25BMZsF5sXNTPqHqhwJU&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMjZS2rJ_LAhUqGZoKHfIWBvMQ6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=%22Beauty%20is%20composed%20of%20an%20eternal%2C%20invariable%20element%20whose%20quantity%20is%20extremely%20difficult%20to%20determine%22&f=false, 2012, p. 169

Beauty , Fashion , Passion

“Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)”

Jean-Luc Godard

Source: La Nouvelle Vague

Silence

“To be immortal and then die”

Jean-Luc Godard

Source: Breathless

“Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

Truth , Time

“There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“Every edit is a lie.”

Jean-Luc Godard
Lie

“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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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.”

Jean-Luc Godard

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

Life , Art , Literature , Painting

“Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Cited in: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/apr/16/art

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