Passion

This is a good introduction to late-period Godard: all (ideological) passion spent, Oncle Jean is just going to show us a good time. Pretty girls lolling around the pool naked, glamourous stars like Hanna Schygulla with little to do, Isabelle Huppert when she could still play dewy-eyed ingenues, a ridiculous peplum being filmed by greedy, unscrupulous types (the director should have been played by Jacques Dutronc instead of that dour Polish actor).

It's 1982,these are the Thatcher-Reagan years, nobody thinks about Vietnam or the Palestinians or civil wars in Africa--people only want to make money. Godard gives us hip product-placement, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Mozart instead of Coke or Pepsi.

Jean-Luc Godard's "Passion" can only be described as an absolute bore. The director presents his audience with a film that hardly has a storyline; there is no intrigue and no entertainment. Lets say that his pursuit for originality is the reason why it's all so strange and dull. The disjointed scenes means that the viewer quickly looses interest- this lack of continuity persists throughout the entire film. The classical music in the background sounds like a technical fault, as it inhibits the clarity of the dialogue- all I could hear was mumbled monotone voices. There is much confusion and it takes a lot of effort to identify characters and establish relationships between them.Being a film student myself, as much as I would like say that Godard moves away from typical Hollywood cinema and presents us with an artistic piece, the film is an absolute flop. The story does not develop, the nudity scenes are pointless, and the characters are uninteresting. When the film finally ended , I came out feeling unfulfilled.

It's not that I don't like arty films, I just found this so dreary. i can see why it may be of interest to a film-student, but to sit through it for entertainment purposes is certainly not recommendable! If you suffer from lack of sleep, check this out and it'll have you snoozing within no time at all. A christmas present for a friend you want to get rid of. In other words - pretentious crap.

Godard scholarship, lined along the axes of variants of French post-structuralism, would appear to have gotten it all wrong: a Godard movie can't be assimilated into a coherent and non-self-contradictory statement about work, gender, representation, or whatever academically approved topic you might name; it can't even be assimilated into a coherent process. What has to be confronted is that the work is essentially diaristic and subjective; these films are the more or less uncensored insides of Godard's head, not a white paper on a topic (no matter how "challenging" or "frustrating to expectations").

It also must be acknowledged that for Godard, even ideation is essentially sensuous, aestheticisable; ideas, like a piece of irruptive slapstick staging, a stale aphorism, a blast of the Mozart Requiem, are objects of delectation and desire, and finally repositories of aesthetic emotion--handwrapped presents. To say that the ideology of Godard's Maoist period was finally another aesthetic object for him is not to condescend to him as a radical-chicster. Very simply, Godard is an artist for whom the gland that produces aesthetic feeling works ten times more overtime than anyone else.

This produces the jarring and sometimes tonic feeling that we are overhearing the disordered and associative thoughts of God as He falls asleep. In a late, lyric work like HELAS POUR MOI, this quality becomes transcendent: the film is like a communication from a higher alien intelligence. In PASSION, that desire to aestheticize everything in sight, to wave a wand marked "excruciating beauty," in essence to make like a cinematic Goldfinger, is tripped up by the story Godard was required to tell in order to receive funding.

The necessity of telling a story is one of the (many) subjects that flit by in this production, which followed Godard's minorly popular comeback, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF. And the story Godard tells is so halfheartedly offered it disrupts the all-pervasive atmosphere of heightened lyricism he generates elsewhere. In essence, it's the same old movie about the making of a movie: the director (Jerzy Radzilowicz) is an idiot caught between a virginal proletarian (Isabelle Huppert!) and a slatternly hanger-on (Hanna Schygulla). The director pontificates, the producer (Michel Piccoli) avoids paying checks, and the inevitable phone calls for completion funds are delivered in dirty rooms.

If this reminds you of everything from BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE to LIVING IN OBLIVION you're right; but nothing in those movies compared to Godard's strategy of contempt-uously making his stars Huppert and Piccoli stutter and cough, respectively. Or to the moment when a grip tells a child extra out of nowhere, "O those who will come after us--do not harden your hearts against us."

PASSION reminded me of John Simon's review of LE GAI SAVOIR, which began in the manner of, "I have seen no movie more illucid, arbitrary, and, yes, insane as..." PASSION genuinely is insane--it raises every line, every gesture, every landscape to a plane of unbearable intensity, and refuses to draw any lines between them. The cumulative effect suggests the personality of a slightly depressed but highly stimulated schizophrenic. Godard's late work is so beyond the prison of our narrative and identificational expectations that we may have to wait several lifetimes for its voice to be genuinely, not just indulgingly, heard.

In narrative painting, a story is told by the image, either through the composition or devices such as registers or continuous narrative. In a film, the story and image are separate and the image is usually a reenactment of the story.

Jean-Luc Godard would say (and has said, more or less) that all art forms have an interrelationship and interchangeability. With this philosophy in mind he used his work to try to break down film from its conceptual boundaries of the narrative. In a sense this is a beautiful gesture, and I'm not denying this, but this manifesto-based approach to art- making leads to a lot more of explaining yourself than creating original work. The Godard film I want to put in question is called Passion (1982). It scandalizes the film vernacular of that postmodern trope, the film within the film. It goes behind the scenes of film-making, but the mock-film, which is also titled Passion, has no plot. It simply recreates a few painting "masterpieces" on film with real characters, on a real scale. The seminal painting- reenactment is Eugene Delacroix's The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople.

Delacroix truly wanted to revolutionize narrative painting of the Romantic period in France. He was fed up with the conservatism introduced by painters like David. So rather than painting simple, yet psychological moments in a narrative like The Death of Marat, he tried to expand the modes of depicting narrative. The result of this effort is evident in The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, completed in 1838, at the height of his career. His mode for this painting is somewhere between narrative registers and a theatrical moment (such as the moment Géricault chose for Raft of the Medusa). Elements of story are scattered around the chaos of the historical event: a woman kneels over her fallen friend, an old man tries to protect a young woman from the crusaders on horseback, another man fights a soldier on the steps of a temple, etc. At face value, it looks a bit like an epic painting, but it isn't. Epic paintings always have a shining moment; in Delacroix's, every moment shines in its own way. So while Delacroix's practice wasn't necessarily interdisciplinary, it most certainly zigzagged across painting genres. This aspect of the work is probably one of the Godard's interests in Delacroix, being that Godard was a seminal figure in the development of the shiftiest art movement to date, postmodernism.

The understanding that there are separate shining moments in both Godard's Passion and Delacroix's The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople is very important to the interpretation of these works. As Jerzy, the director of Godard's film within the film said, "An image is not beautiful because it is brutal and eerie it is because the solidarity between ideas is distant and just." This line is incredibly profound, because it lays out the truth of art and life in general before the work; that truth is that all ideas are conceived disparate from one another because ideas come out of experience, which coincidentally is a paraphrasing of another one of Jerzy's lines. This idea becomes more important as the movie progresses. The other painting-reenactments, which appear closer to the beginning of the movie, are simply still images transferred to three dimensions and then recorded on film; but when he gets to the Delacroix scene (which was the most modern of the paintings and also stretched the concept of narrative the most), he is true to his philosophy. The characters begin the scene by reenacting the sacking of Constantinople, so as to have the experience, each one on an individual level, to be able to depict it. The action, which was being filmed, didn't even seem important to the filmmakers, in fact some of the production assistants were yelling at the actors (especially the women who were pretending rather convincingly to be raped and harassed) to get back into their places, as if they were supposed to be standing still. The action became a way for the still image to fall into place on a more real level than could be composed (a testament to Godard's philosophies).

So there you have it, another piece of writing about ambitious men who wanted to make their mark on civilization (and if you pay attention to the gender relations in this movie, this is appropriate to mention). There's a lot of pressure out their for the ambitious man, and he is extremely sensitive. It's a tiring job for people who are more interested in theory than something more tangible (medium over message). And so they deal in epics and ambiguity. Godard, intent on advancing the medium of film is torn between writing stories and making abstractions that somehow incorporate characters. His answer, make a film about a filmmaker, making a film with master paintings in it. In the end, he creates a crypt filled so much with briefly explored theories (which may be too much to really comprehend) that it essentially becomes meaningless. Let's face it, Godard's Passion is a puzzle, and Delacroix's The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople is a puzzle with historical information behind it. I'd have to say that watching Godard's Passion was like being spoon-fed personal beliefs; not a work, but his philosophy. But, I liked it. As an artist, it is liberating to think of what Godard proposed with his reenactment of the invasion of Constantinople. Maybe if I get into the right groove, my work will somehow form out of a rehashing of my experiences, and I can make my experiences as exciting as a reenactment of The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople.