Wit & Attitude Quote by Jacques Rivette

Rivette’s jab lands because it skewers a familiar pose: the artist who claims purity by keeping their eyes and ears “clean.” The line is engineered as a double insult. First, it’s practical and cruelly simple - their work is weak because their reference library is thin. Then it pivots to the real target: the romanticized fear of influence, dismissed as “idiotic,” as if that anxiety were less an artistic principle than an excuse for incuriosity.

The subtext is a defense of cinema as a conversation, not a confessional. Rivette came out of the Cahiers du cinema culture where watching was a form of thinking and where directors were expected to have lineages - not to hide them. In that context, the idea that you can make films without absorbing films isn’t noble; it’s like insisting you can write without reading because reading might “contaminate” your voice. He’s also quietly calling out a certain strain of auteur mythology: the genius who springs forth untouched, authenticity preserved by isolation. Rivette suggests the opposite: originality is often the byproduct of deep looking, not the absence of it.

What makes the quote work is its inversion of the influence panic. Seeing “too much” doesn’t dilute you; it sharpens taste, reveals choices, exposes laziness. Rivette’s provocation implies that influence isn’t the threat - unexamined influence is. Watching more doesn’t make you derivative; it makes you accountable.