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.
There is a new world coming and this new world is very rude.
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.
One must confront vague ideas with clear images.
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?
Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.
To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.
The way we have done pictures has to be disappeared.
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.
To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.
There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas.
I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
I learned from Rossellini that you are rich even if you have a little money.
There is no such thing as intellectual property.
The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.
Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.
I don't know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.
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'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.
This is not a just image, this is just an image.
Through most of my career I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'
It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.
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.
When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.
Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.
There are two kinds of homeland: one that is given is like a negative, and one that you have to conquer is like the positive.
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.
Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.
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.
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.
Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.
I think I'm innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures, and, well OK.
Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.
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.
You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.
"Away, away," says hate. "Closer, closer," says love.
Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.
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.
When I have a low budget I always try to make it a lesson in economy.
In Europe, the houses and the apartments are getting smaller. So there is no need to increase the screen because the apartment is becoming smaller.
Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.
Even with a small video we will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show it to someone. You won't get the Oscar for it. But, after all, why are you writing and why are you filming?
I'm satisfied to have an ordinary success and an ordinary life and an ordinary income. Later, I don't know.
If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
When the film stock disappears, the matter - because movies are matter - (disappears). The laws of this have been established by Newton, Einstein, and others: there is a correspondence between light and matter, and light is matter. And energy.
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.
Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.
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.
When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
Cinema is movement, after all.
Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.
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.
I am nowhere. You can call me the man in the middle.
I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.
All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.
The world isn't a sad place, it's just big.
Living, it can be sad too.
The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?
Photography is truth.
You can be with other people, which is ideal, or you can be alone.
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.
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.
Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.
This new world which is being born is cynical and amnesiac. And it has eliminated perspective.
I think laughter comes because things are hardly working.
When you are out in the land, OK, you have the land but you are alone with it. And sometimes it is too much.
When I go in front of the light - go towards it - it is because it brings me energy. That's all.
Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.
You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.
When sex gets problematic, the totalitarianist walks in.
Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.
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.
To be immortal and then die
I never read Karl Marx.
Movies are a world of Fragments.
There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.
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.
What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.
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.
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
We are all older and more tired.
All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun
I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.
Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)
I make film to make time pass.
When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.
Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.
I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.
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!
There are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.
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.
Because my movies are not successful, they are not shown. So I make a living from the budget.
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.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images.
Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.
To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
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.
There is no light in electronincs. There is lightening. But lightening is not real light.
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
Cinema teaches us about the human body and how we look at things.
I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.
Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.
In movies, comedy and tragedy are all the same.
The average income in France is $1,000 a month, and you can't live decently on that.
I write and film history; I don't make it.
