Jean-Luc Godard
22 quotes
Biography
"To be immortal and then die"
"The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second"
"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."
"Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship."
"Film begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end … but not necessarily in that order."
"In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me."
"I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring."
"As soon as we were happy, he tried to get at us by another means, another path. He provoked a new ordeal. One could have thought that it bored him, happiness."
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film."
"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."
"I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas."
"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world."
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."
"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."
"He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."
"To be or not to be. That's not really a question."
"i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle."
"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."
"One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together."
"Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form."
"All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat."