Enrique Rivero in The Blood of a Poet (1930, dir. Jean Cocteau)

Poster for Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur Pour l’Échafaud) (1958, dir. Louis Malle) (art by French New Wave artist Clément Hurel)

Sabine Haudepin & Jeanne Moreau in Jules & Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut) 

(via)

Pascal Lamorisse in The Red Balloon (1956, dir. Albert Lamorisse)

Les Enfants Terribles (1950, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

Nora Gregor in The Rules of the Game (1939, dir. Jean Renoir)

Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Sabine Haudepin & Henri Serre in Jules & Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut)

“I’m not a religious person, but I’m a faithful person. I believe in images. I have no children, only movies.”

-Jean-Luc Godard

Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962, dir.Jean-Luc Godard)

“It seems to me that in Paris today, we are all living more or less in a state of prostitution. The increase in prostitution, literally speaking, is partial proof of this statement because it calls into question the body, but one can prostitute oneself just as equally with the mind, the spirit. I think it is a collective phenomenon, and perhaps one which is not altogether new. But what is new is that people find it normal.”

–Jean-Luc Godard (1966)

Anna Karina & Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Woman is a Woman (1961, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

“For me, it’s a film on the nostalgia for musical comedy, as when Anna says: “Ah, I’d like to be in a musical comedy,” it was rather in that vein….We made music that gave the impression that the people were often singing. I mean, which is placed at the same time as, and under, the words in order to give them the tone of opera.

It isn’t a musical comedy, but it isn’t just a talking film either. It’s a regret that life is not lived in music.”

-Jean-Luc Godard

Jeanne Moreau & Gerard Philipe in Dangerous Liaisons (aka Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1959, dir. Roger Vadim)

“He’d call me false & faithless and I’ve always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they’re the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.”