Quotes by Jean-Luc Godard
Welcome to our collection of quotes by Jean-Luc Godard. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard (UK: GOD-ar, US: goh-DAR; French: [ʒɑ̃ lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement, and is arguably the most influential French filmmaker. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork.
During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which emphasized established convention over innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless, helping to establish the New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often 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 (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted). 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, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
He has been married twice, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965)—were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.
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.
Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.
There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
There are two kinds of homeland: one that is given is like a negative, and one that you have to conquer is like the positive.
Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.
When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
In the beginning there was not even talking. In movies, there was no need for that. Because it was more evident if there was no talking. Only in sports does there remain this fervor, which can even become violent. There's this desire to see something big.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
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.
Movies will continue one way or another. Maybe on video. Even on video games. You have to look at it, if you have children, or if you are linked to children, because it's new for them. This has not disappeared; the look of a child who is discovering the world, whatever it is.
I write and film history; I don't make it.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
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.
I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.
I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.
There are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.
When the film stock disappears, the matter -- because movies are matter -- (disappears). The laws of this have been established by Newton, Einstein, and others: there is a correspondence between light and matter, and light is matter. And energy.
Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.
Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.
I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.
Words and action in movies are the spirit or the mind. And these days the body is almost completely forgotten. In the beginning the body -- nature -- was more part of the action.
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.
I've decided that what interests me most is that you can only capture the light at a certain time. But after that, five minutes after that, then it's a different thing. So if you don't have the right aperture, you've missed it. Of course, you can correct it in the lab. But not really.
I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.
If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
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.
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.
The trouble with Hollywood is that it has poisoned us. If you see a poster of a movie it is mainly the picture of a woman and a man. Always a love story. Yes. But it shouldn't be that way. It should be another (way).
People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me.
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
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.
Landscapes are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
Photography is truth.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.
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.
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.
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass.
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.
Once I had seen 'Journey to Italy,' I knew that, even if I were never to make movies, I could make them.
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.
I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
