Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Rivette

There is a quiet provocation in Rivette admitting, almost offhandedly, that he watches a lot of movies - and that this apparently shocks people. The line works because it exposes a weird cultural contradiction: we like our auteurs best when they seem to descend from the clouds with original visions, untainted by the very medium they supposedly reinvent. Rivette punctures that romance. He makes the act of looking sound like a discipline, not a pastime, and he treats other people’s amazement as faintly absurd.

The subtext is both defensive and defiant. As a key figure of the French New Wave and a former critic at Cahiers du Cinema, Rivette came out of cinephilia: the belief that movies are a language you learn by immersion, argument, obsession. So when “certain people” act surprised, he’s really calling out a shallow notion of artistic purity - the idea that influence is contamination. For Rivette, influence is oxygen. Watching films isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s research, training, and communion.

The intent also has a sly class critique. “Certain people” can be read as gatekeepers who romanticize the director as lone genius while dismissing the grind of attention and apprenticeship. Rivette’s tone suggests: if you’re astonished that a filmmaker studies film, what exactly do you think cinema is - magic? The line turns humility into authority: he’s not bragging about his taste, he’s stating the baseline requirement for taking the art form seriously.