110+ Jean-Luc Godard Quotes On Cinema, Iconoclastic And Innovative

Jean-Luc Godard 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. He is known for his stylistic innovations and refusal to conform to traditional film making conventions, often challenging both the conventions of narrative cinema and the political and cultural establishment. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jean-Luc Godard on cinema, iconoclastic, innovative.

Top 10 Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

1. He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
2. A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
3. Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
4. 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.
5. To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.
6. Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
7. What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.
8. When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
9. I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
10. Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

Jean-Luc Godard Image Quotes

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

Jean-Luc Godard Short Quotes

• When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.
• Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
• There is no such thing as intellectual property.
• My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.
• One must confront vague ideas with clear images.
• There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.
• I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.
• To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
• You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.
• It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes About Cinema

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

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second. — Jean-Luc Godard

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. — Jean-Luc Godard

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments. — Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is movement, after all. — Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes About Movies

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same. — Jean-Luc Godard

Something that I like in movies, and I dislike too, is that they can't be projected well. — Jean-Luc Godard

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? — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

Because my movies are not successful, they are not shown. So I make a living from the budget. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes About Movie

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). — Jean-Luc Godard

If you have made three or four films, my feeling is, he is older than me because I am still making my first movie. That helps me. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — 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

The fact is that, unless you are very good, most first movies are too long, and you lose your rhythm and your audience over two or three hours. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Luc Godard Quotes About Film

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

Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami. — 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

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

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

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

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

What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film. — Jean-Luc Godard

The silent film, it was cut at the age of thirty. — Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard Famous Quotes And Sayings

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. — 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

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

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

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

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

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas. — Jean-Luc Godard

There is a new world coming and this new world is very rude. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland. — Jean-Luc Godard

The projector will soon disappear. The camera, not really. OK, it depends... it depends on change. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well. — Jean-Luc Godard

I have a large number of cassettes, but I look at them mainly for reference purposes. — Jean-Luc Godard

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

There is a problem in pretending I can still control my destiny in the commercial market. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

Photography is truth. — 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

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

We are all older and more tired. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

When I have a low budget I always try to make it a lesson in economy. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know. — Jean-Luc Godard

I write and film history; I don't make it. — 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

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

There is no light in electronincs. There is lightening. But lightening is not real light. — 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 am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker. — Jean-Luc Godard

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. — Jean-Luc Godard

When I go in front of the light - go towards it - it is because it brings me energy. That's all. — Jean-Luc Godard

(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. — 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

I'm very interested in tennis, but when I try to tell younger players about [Bill] Tilden, they're not interested. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

We are losing our own capacity because we are poisoned in one way or another. — Jean-Luc Godard

On TV you can't show landscapes. You just can't. Even a postcard is better. — Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Jean-Luc Godard

1. Jean-Luc Godard's work emphasizes the importance of challenging conventions and exploring new ways of telling stories.
2. His films often explore the complexities of relationships, identity, and the human experience.
3. His work encourages viewers to think critically and question the status quo.