Quotes

What I would most like to do is to make movies with a completely invisible camera.

We have to show what lies beyond behavior, while knowing we can't show anything but behavior.

[on his work] You can say that my work is closer to the novel - to a certain classic style of novel which the cinema is now taking over - than to other forms of entertainment, like the theater.

[on Emmanuelle Riva's performance in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)] She isn't a classical heroine, at least not one that a certain classical cinema has habituated us to see, from David Griffith [D.W. Griffith] to Nicholas Ray.

[on My Night at Maud's (1969)] What retains your interest in this film is the fact that my characters have a discourse to give, while in the majority of films, this is absent. Note that in general, I have always had misgivings about discursive films. But you are often attracted by things which seem the most unattractive and the most perilous to you. My idea was precisely to integrate a discourse into the film and to avoid the film being at the service of the discourse, at the service of the thesis. But throughout history, starting with the Greeks, discourse has been very important in the theatre. The Greek theatre was composed of maxims, of moral reflection, which didn't prevent it from being real theatre.

...a film never allows us to admire a translation of the world, but to admire, through this translation, the world itself. The cinema is an instrument of discovery, even in fictional films. Because it is poetry, it is revelatory and, from the fact that it is revelatory, it is poetry.

It is certain that as a work of art, a film corresponds to your description: film is a reconstruction, an interpretation of the world. But out of all the arts, the cinema - and this is its paradoxical character - is the one in which the reality of the thing filmed has the most importance, in which the "interpretation" aspect seems sometimes to entirely disappear. In other words, it's the miracle of the first Lumière films. The impression that these films give us is to make us see the world with different eyes and to admire, as Pascal said, things whose originals we don't admire.

The art of cinema takes us back to the world, if it is true that the other arts have distanced us from it. It has forced us, throughout the course of its history, and forces us still, to take the world into consideration.

The classical age of cinema is not behind us, but ahead.

Believe it or not, Diderot is a more modern scriptwriter than Faulkner is.

Art is a reflection of our time. But isn't it also an antidote?