Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

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 never read Karl Marx.

Something that I like in movies, and I dislike too, is that they can't be projected well.

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

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.

When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.

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.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

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.

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.

Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

To become immortal, and then to die.

Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?

Movies are a world of Fragments.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

Projection will disappear. And the possibility that was given by motion pictures will be missed. The possibility of there being a real audience - a group of people who have nothing in common, but, at a certain time of the day or the week, are able to look with other nknown neighbors at something bigger than they are. To look at their problems in big. Not in small.

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

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.

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared.

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.

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!

There is a new world coming and this new world is very rude.

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

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.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

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.

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.

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.

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

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

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.

Living, it can be sad too.

I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

I don't like Paris or being in big cities.

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.