[Godard read art historians, critics, interpreters’ work and used thoughts/descriptions which he identified with personally as a source of expression and as a platform for an image/ set of images.]

Velasquez, past the age of 50, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony. Henceforth, he captured only those mysterious interpenetrations that united shape and tone by means of a secret but unceasing progression that no convulsion or cataclysm could interrupt or impede. Space reigns supreme. It’s as if some ethereal wave skimming over surfaces soaked up their visible emanations to shape them and give them form and then spread them like a perfume, like an echo of themselves, like some imperceptible dust, over every surrounding surface.

-Pierrot le Fou

maybe an object is what serves as a link between two subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together. but since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as they unite, and my words unite by what they express, and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since… since… since I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me, nor the subjectivity expelling me, since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness… I have to listen more, more than ever I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother. the world, alone. today, when revolutions are impossible and bloody wars loom, when capitalism is unsure of its rights and the working class is in retreat, when the lightning progress of science makes future centuries hauntingly present, when the future is more present than the present, when distant galaxies are on my doorstep. my fellow creature, my brother. where do we start? but start at what? “God created heaven and earth”… sure, but that’s too easy. we should put it better. say that the limits of language are the world’s limits, and the limits of my language are my world’s limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. and one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits, and there will be no questions nor answers. it will all be a blur. but if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. everything will follow from there.

-2 or 3 Things

Words have overwritten the image. Notions of culture. What constitutes culture anymore? We are incapable of liberating ourselves. Life exists, death does not. Language cannot always be trusted. It has the power to alienate us from conciousness. Perhaps our differences constitute the root of our existence.

-Notre Musique