Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Rivette

A jab disguised as a shrug: Rivette is calling out the pious myth of the self-contained auteur. “Pretend” does the real work here. He’s not accusing filmmakers of ignorance, but of performance - a cultivated blindness that lets them claim purity, originality, even moral distance from the culture that feeds them. To say you “never see anything” is to deny influence, to dodge the messy debt artists owe to other artists, and to protect your brand from the taint of admiration, imitation, or theft.

The line lands because it’s both insider gossip and aesthetic manifesto. Coming out of the French New Wave ecosystem - and Rivette’s own trajectory from Cahiers du cinema critic to director - it reads like a critique of posturing within the very class of filmmakers who benefited from cinephilia. The New Wave was built on watching: Hollywood genre pictures, Renoir, Rossellini, serials, theatre. Rivette’s cinema, with its long takes, conspiratorial narratives, and porous boundaries between rehearsal and reality, wears its “looking” on the surface. His films feel like they’re made by someone who has spent a lifetime studying how scenes behave.

Subtextually, he’s also defending curiosity as an ethical stance. To watch is to admit the world exists beyond your own interiority; to refuse to watch is to enforce a kind of artistic solipsism. Rivette frames that refusal as “odd” - not evil, just suspiciously unnatural - because any filmmaker who’s serious about images should be, first, a serious spectator.