Luc Godard Quotes & Sayings

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

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. — 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

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome
The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. — Douglas Coupland

When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other. — Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. — 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

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error. — Jean-Luc Godard

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others. — Jean-Luc Godard

To be or not to be. That's not really a question. — 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

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

I would never see a good movie for the first time on television. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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. — 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

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

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

The world isn't a sad place, it's just big. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

Good films get smaller audiences, but more of the viewer. — Jean-Luc Godard

Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him? — 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

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

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

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

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to. — 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

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

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

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

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead. — Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. — Jean-Luc Godard

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life. — Abbas Kiarostami

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools. — 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

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

The cinema is truth 24 frames-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

One must confront vague ideas with clear images, — Jean-Luc Godard

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all. — Jean-Luc Godard

When you photograph a face ... you photograph the soul behind it. — Jean-Luc Godard

A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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? — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. — 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

Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed. — Jean-Luc Godard

To be immortal and then die — 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

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

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

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

But the strength that remains, which is principally destructive, is the film's dialectical relationship to most of the other movies that we see, its capacity to make their most time-honored conventions seem tedious, shopworn, and unnecessary. This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present... — Jonathan Rosenbaum

All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat. — Jean-Luc Godard

I've always thought - and I don't even know if I'd be right for the part - that Jean Seberg would make a great biopic. She was in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless,' she played Joan of Arc. She had this eventful and traumatic adulthood, she thought the FBI was after her, and she became a darling of the French New Wave. — Gillian Jacobs

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context. — Jean-Luc Godard

Every edit is a lie. — Jean-Luc Godard

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection. — 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

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

When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in. — 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

Movies are a world of Fragments. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

Alphaville is the title of one of my favorite movies. Jean-Luc Godard. — Haruki Murakami

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

Photography is truth. — 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

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

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

When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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. — 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

There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. — 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

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

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

I make film to make time pass. — Jean-Luc Godard

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.' — Jean-Luc Godard

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not. — Jean-Luc Godard