Godard Quotes

I was six years old when I saw my first Godard movie, eight when I first experienced Bergman. I wanted to be a director when I was fourteen. ~ Julie Delpy

Like Godard, Tati is also remarkably appreciative of the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes, patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence. ~ Vincent Canby

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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 ~ Jean-Luc Godard

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

One can enjoy existence, not life. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. '
- Godard on Godard: Critical Writings ~ Jean-Luc Godard

People love a seer, until he starts to look beyond them. ~ Jim Ridley

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

There are no more simple images ... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images ... ~ Jean-Luc Godard

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone - ) ~ Jess Walter

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. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

Godard is incredibly brilliant, the things he says. Apparently here in France, the most interesting thing when a new film of his is going to come out are his press conferences, because he's so brilliant. ~ Brian De Palma

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable. ~ Steven Soderbergh

Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

A lot of films made me love the movies, everything from Hitchcock to Godard. But the ones that really grabbed me were Costa-Gavras's films like 'Z' and 'State of Siege.' ~ Paul Haggis

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home. ~ Paul Auster

Don't ever promise to adore me forever. Let's keep the feeling that this love of ours is a love without tomorow. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second. ~ Stanley Donen

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

To be immortal and then die ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie, ~ Jean-Luc Godard

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. ~ Noah Baumbach

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. ~ 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

What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal ... and then die. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville.
CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal."
...
ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked.
CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Change nothing so that everything will be different ~ Jean-Luc Godard

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom? ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

This is not a just image, this is just an image. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

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

Photography is truth. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him? ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness. ~ Haruki Murakami

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. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Take a drawing by Matisse, a simple curve of a leg or a shoulder. Is there a basis, at the beginning when he starts drawing his curve? There isn't. This is what I'm trying to say. And that's what comprises the originality of Max Ophuls, which he acquired a little bit at a time, because in Liebelei, in Letter from an Unknown Woman, in his American films, it's not there. It's a freedom that is earned and that is found, that isn't applied. On a basic level, it's neither better nor worse as a way of making a film. But there's something extremely original that we found so satisfying back in the day and that continues to satisfy me now … There's a kind of pure cinema of that era – you might even call it experimental – which has disappeared. There's no literature…not that there's no text or dialogue, but there's no pre-literature.

(Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Marcel Ophuls, 2002) ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form ... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion ~ Jean Baudrillard

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. ~ Werner Herzog

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

To become immortal, and then to die. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ] ~ Jim Jarmusch

I go back to many films that I really love. Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don't watch, unless I need them. ~ Agnes Varda

My father loved 'Godard and Truffaut.' He was more artsy. My mom loved the 'Bourne' trilogy; she likes big blockbusters. She loved that I did 'I Am Legend.' My passion for acting came with my passion for movies. ~ Alice Braga

There is no such thing as intellectual property. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

I've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. ~ Jean-Luc Godard