"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order"
About this Quote
Order is the polite fiction we tell ourselves so experience will sit still. Godard’s line tweaks that fiction with a grin, framing narrative chronology as a convenience, not a law. Coming from a director who made a career out of jump cuts, fragmented plots, and characters who seem to know they’re being watched, it’s less a cute paradox than a manifesto: cinema doesn’t have to behave like a well-made novel. It can think out loud.
The intent is practical and provocative. Godard isn’t arguing that stories don’t need structure; he’s insisting that structure isn’t synonymous with sequence. A beginning is an invitation, a middle is pressure, an end is consequence. Those functions can arrive in any order if the film’s emotional logic holds. That’s why the quote lands: it shifts the question from “What happens next?” to “What does this moment do to us now?” In Godard’s hands, the “end” can appear early as an existential verdict; the “beginning” can be a retrospective invention; the “middle” can be a collage of digressions that reveal character and politics more sharply than plot ever could.
Context matters: postwar European cinema, TV, advertising, Marxism, American genre films, and the New Wave’s impatience with inherited rules. Godard’s subtext is defiant but also diagnostic. Linear storytelling can smuggle in comforting ideas about causality, morality, and progress. Scramble the order and you expose the seams: how movies persuade, how memory works, how ideology edits reality. The joke is that he’s still demanding a beginning, middle, and end. He just won’t pretend life supplies them neatly.
The intent is practical and provocative. Godard isn’t arguing that stories don’t need structure; he’s insisting that structure isn’t synonymous with sequence. A beginning is an invitation, a middle is pressure, an end is consequence. Those functions can arrive in any order if the film’s emotional logic holds. That’s why the quote lands: it shifts the question from “What happens next?” to “What does this moment do to us now?” In Godard’s hands, the “end” can appear early as an existential verdict; the “beginning” can be a retrospective invention; the “middle” can be a collage of digressions that reveal character and politics more sharply than plot ever could.
Context matters: postwar European cinema, TV, advertising, Marxism, American genre films, and the New Wave’s impatience with inherited rules. Godard’s subtext is defiant but also diagnostic. Linear storytelling can smuggle in comforting ideas about causality, morality, and progress. Scramble the order and you expose the seams: how movies persuade, how memory works, how ideology edits reality. The joke is that he’s still demanding a beginning, middle, and end. He just won’t pretend life supplies them neatly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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