Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Luc Godard - Page 2

Cinema is movement, after all.

It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.

Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.

One must confront vague ideas with clear images.

Movies are a world of Fragments.

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.

I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.

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 cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

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.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.

There is no light in electronincs. There is lightening. But lightening is not real light.

I am nowhere. You can call me the man in the middle.

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

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

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.

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.

I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

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.

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

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?

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.

The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.

All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.

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

Through most of my career I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.

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

I've always said that to make movies, to make images and sound, is possible by one way or another. And it has not to be ruled by the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Pharaohs from Hollywood or wherever. I have tried very hard to make even a small budget picture here. It always fails. Over a dozen times. And now I know why. It was only because I wanted to be in control of the money. To spend it the way I wanted.

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.

Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.

When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.

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

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.

If you have $300,000 to shoot a cigarette on a table, it's an enormous amount of money. Maybe that's why my movies are the way they are. But it's the only way I can make a living.

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)

Cinema teaches us about the human body and how we look at things.

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.

We are all older and more tired.

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

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.

When you are out in the land, OK, you have the land but you are alone with it. And sometimes it is too much.

Photography is truth.

Living, it can be sad too.

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.

This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

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.

There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.

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.

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK.

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.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.