There’s no point in having sharp images if you’ve got fuzzy ideas.

The wording about “sharp images” and “fuzzy ideas/intentions” appears in a 1963 French-language review by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma, where he criticizes documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock’s cinéma-vérité approach for lacking a clear viewpoint. An English version of the thought later circulated via secondary sources (e.g., Richard Roud’s 1968 book on Godard), which helped popularize the “fuzzy ideas” phrasing.

Technical precision in an image is not meaningful by itself; what matters is having a clear purpose, perspective, or concept guiding the work. Without that, sharpness can only make the underlying emptiness or confusion more obvious.

There’s no point in having a sharp image if intentions are blurred.

There’s no point in having sharp images if you’ve got fuzzy ideas.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.