Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.
Jean-Luc GodardRead
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Documentary and fiction are interconnected, with reality enriching the creative process.
In this quote, Jean-Luc Godard suggests that creating documentaries requires a grounding in fiction, highlighting the relationship between the two genres. He emphasizes that to craft impactful fiction, one must draw inspiration and insights from reality, illustrating the cyclical nature of creativity where reality informs imaginative storytelling and vice versa.
Themes
DocumentaryFictionRealityCreativityArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a film class, to illustrate the creative process, you might quote this while discussing the relationship between documentaries and fiction.
More from Jean-Luc Godard
All quotes βI 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 GodardRead
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc GodardRead
More or less, I am always saying, 'Give me more. Let's do what has not been done.'
Jean-Luc GodardRead
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.
Jean-Luc GodardRead
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
Jean-Luc GodardRead
Similar quotes
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman RushdieRead
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
Lawrence DurrellRead
If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.
Charles BaudelaireRead
For me, purity of movement wasn't enough. I needed expression, more intensity, more mind.
Rudolf NureyevRead
To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality; to infuse life with color, motion and strange scents that intoxicate; to leap beyond imagination into that space between the worlds where fantasy becomes real; to be at once animal and god. Magic is...the ultimate adventure.
StarhawkRead
It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.
Samuel R. DelanyRead