Godard writing about Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's cinema of the 1950s: "There are five or six films in the history of cinema which one wants to review simply by saying 'It is the most beautiful of films.'...Like the starfish that opens and closes, they can reveal or conceal the secret of a world of which they are the sole repository and also the fascinating reflection. Truth is their truth. They secrete it deep within themselves, and yet with each shot the screen is rent to scatter it to the winds. To say of them, 'It is the most beautiful of films,' is to say everything. Why? Because it just is. Only the cinema can permit this sort of childish reasoning without pretending shame. Why? Because it is the cinema... The great creators are probably those whose names come to mind when it is impossible to explain in any other way the variety of sensations and emotions which assail you in certain exceptional circumstances, faced by a wonderful landscape or an unexpected event; Beethoven...when under the stars, on a clifftop battered by the sea; Balzac, when Paris, seen from Montmartre seems to belong to you...An Ingmar Bergman film is, if you like, one twenty-fourth of a second metamorphosed and expanded over an hour and a half. It is the world between two blinks of the eyelids, the sadness between two heart-beats, the gaiety between two handclaps."