by Allan Fish
continuing the Godard mini-series
(France 1982 88m) DVD1/2
Looking for real light
p Catherine Lapoujade, Armand Babault, Martine Marignac d Jean-Luc Godard w Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Claude Carrière ph Raoul Coutard ed Jean-Luc Godard art Jean Bauer, Serge Marzoff cos Christian Gasc, Rosalie Varda
Isabelle Huppert (Isabelle), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Jerzy), Michel Piccoli (Michel), Hanna Schygulla (Hanna), László Szabó (Lászlo), Patrick Bonnel (Patrick), Sophie Luchachevski (Sophie, script-girl), Myriem Roussel (Myriem), Magali Campos (Magali),
In his introduction to Godard’s film on the UK DVD, Colin MacCabe talks of how Passion grew out of a time in Godard’s life when he was given to the belief that it was “no longer the time for great masterpieces, but a time when everything will become a masterpiece.” It’s a statement Andy Warhol might once have agreed with, the effective irrelevance of story, films where what happened on screen was sufficient for art. So in Passion, the real, the staged and the merely observed merge and separate on impulse.
How to begin to describe it; first take the notion of a film being made within the film, directed by Polish director Jerzy and a film whose mission statement seems to be to capture the light effects of various western painted masterpieces. Rubens and Delacroix are mentioned, while Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ and Ingres’ Valpinçon Bather feature heavily. Around them are spun three other central characters, or ciphers as may be more accurate. Michel is a hotelier who houses the crew during the shoot. Hanna is his wife, who loves director Jerzy and who Jerzy wants to be in his Rubens portion of the film. Isabelle works in a nearly adjacent factory – also owned by Michel – and tries to start a strike seemingly mirroring the events of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
As always with Godard, the social and political climate of the era weighs heavily, with obvious nods to Poland (Radziwilowicz was fresh from Wajda’s Man of Iron, and as many forget, Schygulla was born in Katowicz in what was then war-torn Poland), where films such as Bugajski’s Interrogation were being suppressed. Consider then the landscape around Europe and of the change in the cinematic horizons. It was the year of the passing of Henry Fonda and Ingrid Bergman, and of an earlier Euro-goddess taken before her time, Romy Schneider, while Fassbinder would soon indulge in cocaine one too many times. And AIDS was just around the corner.
At one time it was to be shot in Hollywood at Coppola’s Zoetrope studios and alongside Storaro, and it makes one dizzy to think of Godard let loose in a Hollywood studio, like giving an alcoholic the keys to the wine cellar. It was probably a blessing in disguise that Zoetrope sank without trace and Godard was left with no choice but to return to Europe. Back in Geneva, Godard reunited with his old partner Raoul Coutard. All the actors played characters with their own names and, to a degree, with their own film personas. There are nods to earlier Godard’s – the slow zoom onto the camera in the studio recalling Le Mépris, the silent comedy-like chase of Huppert round the factory like something from the Anna Karina years. Hollywood is both the enemy and the ultimate benefactor, leaving the film to go off to find “Sternberg’s light.”
All of which doesn’t come close to putting Godard’s film in any sort of context, partly because Godard’s late works generally do just that. Yet amongst the pleasure of making movies, and the obvious pleasure in looking at decorously naked women, one senses an inherent sadness for something lost. Among snippets of Beethoven, Fauré, Dvorak and others, Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ seems to symbolise a fatality, yet not, it seems, of the cinema itself as Godard would later declare. As the director in the film says “I observe, I transform, I transfer. I smooth off the edges. That’s all” which opens up a typical Godardian paradox, for it was Hollywood who smoothed the edges, cut out the boring bits. For Godard there was no smoothing off, no rules. Had he been a sculptor and created a perfect statue, he’d have lopped an arm off, as if following the advice of Henry II in The Lion in Winter; “nothing in this life has any business being perfect.”
