Godard For a Day

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Jean-Luc Godard,( born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screen writer and critic. He is often identified with the group of filmmakers known as the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave".

Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood cinema as well as the French equivalent, namely the "tradition of quality". He is often considered the most extreme or radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His films express his political ideologies as well as his knowledge of film history. In addition, Godard's films often cite existentialism as he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. His radical approach in movie conventions, politics and philosophies made him the most influential filmmaker of the French New Wave, inspiring directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Arthur Penn, Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, John Woo, Mike Figgis, Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Lester, Jim Jarmusch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Brian De Palma, Wim Wenders, Oliver Stone and Ken Loach. In the 2002 poll of the Sight and Sound publication, Godard ranked #3 in the critics' top ten directors of all time (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films that the critics polled voted for). In August, 2010, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Godard would receive an Honorary Academy Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards. He did not attend the ceremony held in Los Angeles on November 14, 2010.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.
Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Godard

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

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

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.
Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
Jean-Luc Godard

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Jean-Luc Godard

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard

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

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
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