The primary difference, it would seem, between a painting and a film is that in a film there is a narrative in time, while in painting the narrative must be pried from the static image. Thus painting would seem to give primacy to the image as narrative, while film gives primacy to the narrative as image. Most films are made with this formula in mind -- there is a story and a script written first, and then images are shot to match this story. Godard has said, however, that he feels quite the opposite about his own art: "I end up saying to myself, regarding my story of the image, that one never gets to see it as primary, it's always relegated to secondary status" (MacBean 17). In Godard's work, and in Passion especially, the image is always given the autonomous stature it deserves as image before it is enslaved by the narrative of the film. The image gives birth to a narrative-infant unable to sustain itself without its parent's constant presence. Without the image, the narrative of Passion cannot exist; on paper it would be reduced to a few unconnected characters and some shallow political sentiments. When born from the image, however, the narrative becomes highly charged and powerful. Thus there is almost no continuity editing in the classical sense -- each image, each shot, has a life of its own before it is assimilated by the viewer into the narrative pattern. Indeed, the majority of images need not be assimilated at all. Albrecht contends that the "realist" focus of the spectator on the individual, Godardian image, lies outside notions of narrative:
Unlike the images from earlier Godard films, they don't analyse themselves as to the possible ways in which they might be visually structuring a commentary. Thus they are political in their recasting of the Godard text as a whole away from this earlier Marxist polemic and toward a new notion of spectator- oriented realism . . . an attempt to produce the real in the form of "pure and clean" images and authentic emotions and sensations in the spectator. (62)Thus it is a concern for the beauty of the image before the construction of the narrative that drives Godard's practice in his "new" cinema of the eighties. And while not as explicitly Marxist in tone or intent as his earlier work, these films are nonetheless political, through their questioning of dominant narrative practice.
The recreated paintings provide a starting-point (and perhaps an end-point as well) for the social, narrative aspects of the film. On one hand there is Jerzy, the director-within-the-film, who is trying to re-create some nineteenth-century paintings into their cinematic equivalent for his film- within-the-film, also called "Passion". On the other, there is Isabelle, a young factory worker who, upon being fired, gives the Marxist statement that working is a right and not a privilege. These may seem to be two unrelated narratives -- one concerned with an artistic need, the other with a political need, the need for survival. Yet, as Godard has pointed out: "In my film, to show the deep engagement of a small working woman trying to fight for justice, I had to choose images and juxtapositions from what is greatest in the revolutionary past, in order to speak about revolution today" (Sight and Sound 119). The metaphor of painting, then, and of artistic endeavour on the whole, is equated with the need to live -- art is life, and life is art. Or, to be more precise, life is image, in the postmodern sense. With Passion, Godard seems to prefigure Baudrillard's notion of simulation:
In my view there is no substantial qualitative difference between electronic media . . . and other forms such as language, painting or architecture . . . There is no real difference between them; they all operate on the same level, that of simulation . . . All forms can in fact be substituted for one another; . . . they function in terms of "communication" and "information", which are the by-products of simulation. (52-3)The recreations of the paintings, rather than existing on their own narrative or formal levels, are taken out of their individual contexts and thrown into a film where they must relate (or "communicate") not just to the narrative of the film, but to each other as well. Rather than just presenting or re-interpreting old works of art, the film speaks through these paintings, using their pre-established allegorical contexts to comment on the narrative going on in the rest of the film. Godard here creates his own cinematic law: the law of metaphor and anecdote, the relation and intermixing of painting and film, turning paintings into film and film into paintings. They cease to become separate; they become one text. The originality and individuality of each painting is gone -- the simulation has become the reality.
This effect of postmodern simulation is a direct result of commodification. The paintings do not come (in)to the film untainted; they come with their own pre-established meanings, histories, and critical interpretations. All these previous meanings and interpretations, then, are thrust into the film, de-valuing the "original", physical works themselves. It is not necessary to have ever seen any of the original works to derive certain meanings from the film, it is only necessary to have seen copies of the originals. In this respect, the original works cease to be the subject of the film, an aspect of postmodernism Jameson points out:
It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato's conception of the "simulacrum," the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalised to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced, a society [where] . . . the image has become the final form of commodity reification. (18)Thus by blurring the lines between painting and film (one could be tempted to label these "past" and "present") Godard is "selling" us his own version of the past, the past in terms of a constructed cinematic reality: "past" as history, as anecdote, as commodity.
Godard has always tended to avoid composition-in-depth, preferring to emphasise a "flatness" in his cinematic space, but in this film we see the first attempt at the translation of already- established, static, two-dimensional artworks onto/into a three-dimensional screen (the third dimension being time). The medium of film allows the possibility of "getting inside" these paintings, building a three-dimensional reality from their two-dimensional surfaces. In this respect the film works in reverse to the way most other Godard films work. Instead of presenting cinematic space as a flat, two dimensional world, representing the true dimensions of the screen, it takes flat paintings and re-creates them "in-depth"; that is to say, there is an illusion of depth created in this film. To truly get "inside" these paintings, Passion must do it on both a spatial and narrative level. This is accomplished in an ever-increasing fashion throughout the film, starting with the first painting depicted, Rembrandt's The Nightwatch. (Take a look at Godard's version here) Godard's interest here is not so much with the spatial or narrative elements of this sequence, but with the lighting problems it poses. Therefore, he refrains from breaking the plane of the original work. The camera never "enters" the recreation -- all the shots are from its front. However, the scene is surrounded by a lighting controversy -- Jerzy keeps saying that the lighting is never right, and others also complain about this fact. Janson describes a parallel situation with the original work:
The huge canvas . . . shows a military company, whose members had each contributed toward the cost. But Rembrandt did not do them equal justice. Anxious to avoid a mechanically regular design, he made the picture a virtuoso performance of Baroque movement and lighting; in the process some of the figures were plunged into shadow, and some were hidden by overlapping. Legend has it that the people whose portraits he had thus obscured were dissatisfied. (575)Thus we have the painting re-created visually, spatially and metaphorically in the film, by providing controversy similar to the one surrounding its original creation.
The same cannot be said for the second re-creation, Goya's The Third of May, 1808. In the
original painting, the soldiers faces are hidden from view, "a formation of faceless automatons,
impervious to their victims' despair and defiance" (Janson 632). Godard chooses to take the
camera inside the painting here, shooting the soldiers "face on" in a slow tracking shot along the
barrels of their guns, while a voice-over states "You do nothing to change yourselves". This
intrusion into the painting's "life" is not just a simple aesthetic trick. Godard has always been
interested in the construction of oppressor/oppressed relationships:
This last example, while breaking with the spatial form of the original work, still re-creates itself
as a static image. With his next re-creation, Delacroix's The Entry of the Crusaders into
Constantinople, (see Godard's version) Godard animates the figures within the painting itself, not just the camera as it
moves among these figures:
Amidst a studio maquette of Constantinople Godard sets four crusaders on horseback in
motion. Sporting chain mail and breast armour, they ride through the scale model
streets of Constantinople -- the horses' hooves resounding on the wooden
planking of the studio set. It is a highly charged moment, one of the most
highly charged moments in Passion; and it culminates with a nude woman
being snatched up and carried off by one of the crusaders on horseback.
(MacBean 21)
Here is something new within these postmodern re-interpretations. The addition of temporality
allows for an assumption -- the assumption that one of the women will be carried off. This
authorial commentary reveals more about the commodification of images than it does about the
narrative or the painting itself. As MacBean points out, "in patriarchal society, the basic
appropriation is that of women by men. By the nineteenth century . . . patriarchal western
European society found a hypocritical . . . way of holding the nude female body as the object of
the masculine gaze" (21-22). Here, then, the appropriation is quite literal -- the physical
appropriation of a nude woman by a male oppressor. This, however, is only the surface; this
sequence alludes to appropriation on many levels: the appropriation of the female image by
patriarchal society; the appropriation of a culture through religion (the Crusaders); the
appropriation of a painterly image which is then translated into a cinematic one. It also
represents an appropriation of the past, in the form of historical allegory. Here we have a
historicised narrative, told through the simulacra of the static, painted image and the temporal,
filmic image. "We are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra
of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach" (Jameson 25). Godard/Delacroix's The
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople is an interpretation of an interpretation of an
interpretation ad infinitum; the referent, the actual historical event, has been bracketed off,
remaining distant and unknowable.
1. Godard discovered this image one day by chance and shot it himself (Beauviala 165). He "often
begins with the act of discovery, between chance and necessity, always rooted in the
concreteness of creation, and it's only later that he derives the lessons of his discovery, extending
them in another scene or weaving them into another film" (Bergala 63).(back)
Albrecht, Thomas. "Sauve qui peut (l'image): Reading for a Double Life." Cinema Journal
Winter 1991. 61-73.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Evil Demon of Images. Sydney: The Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1988.
Beauviala, Jean Pierre and Jean-Luc Godard. "Genesis of a Camera (First Episode)." Camera
Obscura Vol. 13/14. 162-193.
Bergala, Alain. "The Other Side of the Bouquet." Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991.
Ed. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy. New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1992. 57-73.
Godard, Jean-Luc. "In the Cinema, it is Never Monday." Sight and Sound Spring 1983. Trans.
Gideon Bachman. 118-120.
---. Godard on Godard. Trans. and Ed. Tom Milne. New York: Da Capa, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991.
Janson, Horst Woldemar. History of Art. New York: Times Mirror, 1991.
MacBean, James Roy. "Filming the Inside of His Own Head: Godard's Cerebral Passion." Film
Quarterly Vol. XXXVII, No. 1. 16-24.
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