Inspirational Quotes by Jean-luc Godard (French-born Swiss Film Director)

Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) was a French-Swiss film director who came to prominence with the New Wave group in France during the late 1950s and the ’60s. Godard’s films are known for their innovative and experimental style, often featuring unconventional narrative structures and political themes.

Born and educated in Paris, Godard began his career as a cinema critic (1950) and contributed to the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema 1952–65. He started making short films in 1954, and his first feature film, À bout de soufflé (1960, Breathless,) established him as a leader of the Nouvelle Vague (‘New Wave’) cinema. His elliptical narrative style and original use of jump cuts and freeze frames gained him much critical attention, both enthusiastic and otherwise.

Godard’s influential work from the 1960s includes Bande à part (l964,) Pierrot le Fou (1965,) Alphauille (1965,) and Week-end (1967.) From 1967 onwards, his work became more radically political, and he submerged himself in ‘revolutionary anti-capitalist’ films, although he returned to more mainstream concerns in the 1980s with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980, ‘Slow Motion,’) Detective (1984,) Je uous salue, Marie (1985, ‘Hail Mary’) and a highly idiosyncratic King Lear (1987.) His later work, such as Eloge d’amour (2001, ‘In Praise of Love,’) embraced new video and digital technology.

The English academic and film producer Colin McCabe wrote the biography Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2003.) Godard on Godard (1988) was compiled by Jean Luce Godard and Annette Michelson.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Style

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
—Jean-luc Godard
Topics: Fear

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
—Jean-luc Godard
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

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

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
—Jean-luc Godard
Topics: Girls

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.
—Jean-luc Godard
Topics: Writing

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
Topics: Beauty

Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.
—Jean-luc Godard
Topics: One liners, Photography

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Inspirational Quotes by Jean-luc Godard (French-born Swiss Film Director)

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