Leader – with Truffaut – of the New Wave, then very committed filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday September 13, had forged over time an image of a demanding intellectual, whose many small sentences hit the mark , on subjects as varied as cinema, television, the weather or… supermarkets.
Crazy about cinema, but curious about everything he observed in France
“I tell myself that rarely has a country offered me so many film subjects as today’s France. The number of exciting subjects is staggering. I want to do everything, about sport, politics , and even groceries. Look at a man like Édouard Leclerc [ndlr : fondateur des supermarchés Leclerc]it’s exciting, I would like to make a film about him or with him.” (1965)
“I only want to talk about cinema, why talk about anything else? With cinema, we talk about everything, we get to everything.”
“Photography is truth and cinema is twenty-four times the truth per second…”
“A bit of nostalgia”… for the New Wave
“It was a little moment, the New Wave. A very little moment. If I have a little nostalgia, that’s it. Three people, Truffaut, me and Rivette, some uncles like Rohmer, Melville, Leenhardt.. . They were three boys who had left their families.” (2014)
“Agnès (Varda) was a maverick, she pulled a thread of her own, but she still belonged to the New Wave. And, after her disappearance, we are only two: Jacques Rozier and me. Rozier, we always forgets it. Whereas it started before the others.” (2019)
“In literature, there’s a lot of past and a bit of future, but there’s no present. In cinema, there’s only the present that just passes.” (1997)
“Every story should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.”
“Television manufactures oblivion. Cinema manufactures memories.”
“When we go to the movies, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower them.”
“There is the visible and the invisible. If you only film the visible, you are making a TV movie.”
“Here. X + 3 = 1, it’s the key to cinema. But when we say it’s the key, don’t forget the lock.” (2018)
“A film is a scaffolding. It’s a shapeless pile whose pieces finally fit together. But it’s also a scaffold. A scaffold of ideas. We cut them all the time, many fall out during editing. .”
“Cinema has never been part of the entertainment industry but part of the cosmetics industry, the mask industry, itself a branch of the industry of lies.” (1994)
“Nowadays film festivals are like dental conventions. It’s so folksy it’s depressing.” (1997)
“Will cinema die with you?” – “It’s even the only hope I have. It gives me a goal in life! I believed, when I was young, that it was eternal, but it’s because I believed that I was eternal.” (1983)