Jean-Luc Godard
French-Swiss film director (1930–2022)
Jean-Luc Godard (born December 3, 1930) is a French movie director.
Sourced quotes
- "Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."[1]
- Simple: We become interested in art because it shows us more about ourselves.
- "The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."[2]
- "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."[3]
- "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."[4]
- What it means: Sex and violence keep people interested in movies. Because of this, they are needed for a movie to be popular.
- "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."[5]
- "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."[6]
- "Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."[7]
- [variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.
- "I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."[8]
- "...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."[9]
- "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!"[10]
- Simple: American movies try to make the audience understand everything. This is not likely. This is like eating a potato. You cannot understand every atom of the potato.
- "To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema."[10]
- "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."[10]
- What it means: Movies need to focus on a story, not on having a certain actor.
- "Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."[10]
- Simple: Lawyers and agents now take control of movies.
References
- ↑ "What Is Cinema?" Les Amis du Cinéma (Paris, October 1, 1952).
- ↑ "Strangers on a Train," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, March 10, 1952).
- ↑ "Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction," Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, Sept. 15, 1952).
- ↑ Journal entry, May 16, 1991.
- ↑ Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1967, repr. 1970).
- ↑ Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).
- ↑ Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960).
- ↑ Los Angeles Free Press, March 15, 1968, Gene Youngblood.
- ↑ Los Angeles Free Press, March 22, 1968, Gene Youngblood
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994. David Sterritt
Other websites
Jean-Luc Godard on the English Wikipedia
