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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

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We Once Believed We

Jean-Luc Godard

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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.

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If I'm Speaking It Means That In One Way Or Another When I Say, "i'm Cold" It Belongs To Me: I'm Cold. But Just By Saying This It Becomes General.

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Intellectual Property

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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?

All You Need For A Movie Is A Gun And A Girl.

Europe Has Memories, America Has T-shirts.

I Am Still Associated With A Heroic Period In French Cinema, And My Name Remains Linked To This Period.

You Can Be With Other People, Which Is Ideal, Or You Can Be Alone.

When You Go To The Cinema You Look Up, When You Watch Television You Look Down.

Poetry Is A Game Of Loser-take-all.

Film Begins With Dw Griffith And Ends With Abbas Kiarostami.

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.

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.

I Know That I Am Old, Because Even If I Think I'm Younger Than Everyone - But That's True - My Way Of Hoping And Continuing Is That I Am Always In A Younger Position Than The Other One.

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.

Killing A Man In Defense Of An Idea Is Not Defending An Idea; It Is Killing A Man.

The Cinema Is Not An Art Which Films Life: The Cinema Is Something Between Art And Life.

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.

Cinema Is Not A Series Of Abstract Ideas, But Rather The Phrasing Of Moments.

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.

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.

I Never Read Karl Marx.

To Live In Society Today Is Like Living In One Enormous Comic-strip.

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.

I Have No Desire To Vote For French Politicians, And I'm Not Entitled To Vote In Switzerland.

There Is A Problem In Pretending I Can Still Control My Destiny In The Commercial Market.

When There's 100 People Around You Can't Really Forget Yourself.

(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.

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!

I'm Satisfied To Have An Ordinary Success And An Ordinary Life And An Ordinary Income. Later, I Don't Know.

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.

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.

I'm Very Interested In Tennis, But When I Try To Tell Younger Players About [bill] Tilden, They're Not Interested.

We Are All Older And More Tired.

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To Be Only Spectacular Should Be 5 Or 10 Percent Of Cinema.

I Learned From Rossellini That You Are Rich Even If You Have A Little Money.

One Must Confront Vague Ideas With Clear Images.

Something That I Like In Movies, And I Dislike Too, Is That They Can't Be Projected Well.

I Believe What Jesus Said, But Jesus Never Said Priests Couldn't Be Fools.

Movies Are A World Of Fragments.

Cinema Is Movement, After All.

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.

The World Isn't A Sad Place, It's Just Big.

My Aesthetic Is That Of The Sniper On The Roof.

Reportage Is Interesting Only When Placed In A Fictional Context, But Fiction Is Interesting Only If It Is Validated By A Documentary Context.

I Have A Large Number Of Cassettes, But I Look At Them Mainly For Reference Purposes.

I Don't Know If I Am Free Because I Am Happy Or Happy Because I Am Free.

All You Need To Make A Film Is A Girl And A Gun

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Photography Could Have Been Invented In Color. Colors Existed.

Could Have Been

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.

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.

Living, It Can Be Sad Too.

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When Yeats Said The Center Cannot Hold, He Was Talking For Himself, But It Was True For The Rest Of Us As Well.

The Way We Have Done Pictures Has To Be Disappeared.

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The Projector Will Soon Disappear. The Camera, Not Really. Ok, It Depends... It Depends On Change.

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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.

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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.

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I Think I'm Innocently Representing A Certain Belief In Motion Pictures, And, Well Ok.

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The Silent Film, It Was Cut At The Age Of Thirty.

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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.

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He Who Jumps Into The Void Owes No Explanation To Those Who Stand And Watch.

I Am Nowhere. You Can Call Me The Man In The Middle.

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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.

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Give Me More. Let's Do What Has Not Been Done.

I Don't Like Paris Or Being In Big Cities.

First There Was Greek Civilization. Then There Was The Renaissance. Now We’re Entering The Age Of The Ass.

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Abstract Painting

When I Have A Low Budget I Always Try To Make It A Lesson In Economy.

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There Is No Light In Electronincs. There Is Lightening. But Lightening Is Not Real Light.

When Sex Gets Problematic, The Totalitarianist Walks In.

Cinema Is Capitalism In Its Purest Form.... There Is Only One Solution - Turn One's Back On American Cinema.

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To Become Immortal, And Then To Die.

I've Always Considered The French-speaking Part Of Switzerland As A Province Of France.

Art Is Not A Reflection Of Reality, It Is The Reality Of A Reflection.

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What Is Your Greatest Ambition In Life?' 'to Become Immortal... And Then Die.

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I've Always Wanted, Basically, To Do Research In The Form Of A Spectacle.

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Tv Has Nothing To Do With Painting. It's Just Transmission.

The Truth Is That There Is No Terror Untempered By Some Great Moral Idea.

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You Don't Make A Movie, The Movie Makes You.

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Because My Movies Are Not Successful, They Are Not Shown. So I Make A Living From The Budget.

You Can't Transmit A Landscape, Happily Enough.

Sometime Reality Is Too Complex. Stories Give It Form.

When You Are Out In The Land, Ok, You Have The Land But You Are Alone With It. And Sometimes It Is Too Much.

Americans Have No Past, So They Buy The Pasts Of Others.

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.

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.

To Be Or Not To Be. That's Not Really A Question.

Be Or Not To Be

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.

When I Go In Front Of The Light - Go Towards It - It Is Because It Brings Me Energy. That's All.

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.

A Story Should Have A Beginning, A Middle And An End, But Not Necessarily In That Order.

Movies In Hollywood Now, For The Past 20 Or 30 Years, Are Made Mainly By Lawyers Or Agents.

I Am A Painter With Letters. I Want To Restore Everything, Mix Everything Up And Say Everything.

I Pity The French Cinema Because It Has No Money. I Pity The American Cinema Because It Has No Ideas.

Through Most Of My Career I've Made A Decent Living Making Movies No One Wants To See.

There Is No Point In Having Sharp Images When You've Fuzzy Ideas.

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).

The Cinema Is Truth 24 Frames-per-second.

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

The Invention Of Photography. For Whom? Against Whom?

Film Is Truth 24 Times A Second, And Every Cut Is A Lie.

I'm Franco-swiss. I've Always Been Shuttling Between These Two Worlds, Never Firmly Planted In Either One.

Sometimes Reality Is Too Complex For Oral Communication. But Legend Embodies It In A Form Which Enables It To Spread All Over The World.

I Think Laughter Comes Because Things Are Hardly Working.

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.

Hollywood Was Invented By Hoodlums From Central Europe. And Today A Hollywood Lawyer Is Not A Hoodlum. He's A Bureaucrat.

Film Is Like A Personal Diary, A Notebook Or A Monologue By Someone Who Tries To Justify Himself Before A Camera.

We Are Losing Our Own Capacity Because We Are Poisoned In One Way Or Another.

I Make Film To Make Time Pass.

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