Godards Passion

The Problem of Film Or How Film Makes a Muddle of Work and Art

Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus Kiarina Kordela, Goebbels to Hollywood December 13, 2007

Jean-Luc Godards film Passion (1981) deals primarily with what film is, the difficulty in making a film, and the problems of film production specifically and mechanical reproduction generally. In raising these issues Godard also foregrounds the themes of art and work, which leads to a view of film that has to do with prostitution and the degradation of both art and work in the age of late capitalism. The postmodern view of this film, which I will be investigating along these themic lines, is useful in that it has precisely no allegorical effect whatsoever. The themes of art, work and, to a lesser extent, love, only distantly resembling ideas, allow us to view a show of characters that Godard stages; we see characters reactions to different tropes, situations and sinthoms, which effectively show us the aforementioned themes and how characters embody them without pointing out the characters themselves. (Jameson 176) As Jameson says, Passion exhibits a conspicuous lack of both plot and characters, which could be read in a postmodern perspective. (See 1640168) If read in this way, this lack can be used to uphold Godards ideas by allowing us to focus on his use of themes rather than his use of characters; if we read the film with a modernist perspective, however, we are invited to create connections between characters and events in the diegetic reality and their underlying allegorical structures. This may be useful to some ends, but in this case an underlying allegory would obscure the themes as well as Godards overarching view of the aspects of film, which is what I would like to examine. First, let us look specifically at the lack of both a central plot and a central character in Passion, and how this focuses the viewers attention on themes instead. The plot of Passion is rather elusive in Godards own account of the film: A factory girl [Isabelle] is sacked by her boss. She falls in love with a foreigner [Jerzy] come to make a

film. Then the bosss wife [Hanna] also falls in love with the foreigner. He for his part cannot find a subject for his film, and though there are dozens around him (Jameson 165). This explanation is sketchy and, at best, envelopes the general interactions between a couple of characters, offering up meager facts whose explanation does not truly describe what the film is about; no one plotline is foregrounded. Watching the film we notices the lack of meaningful or climactic events, which cause us to look for something else to hold onto we look for a central character. The lack of a central character is also quite glaring, however, though Jameson upholds it as a necessary feature: Indeed I believe it is aestheticallywrong to posit any central characters at all; wrong to see Jerzy as the hero; wrong to extract the womens two subplots from what is a very tangled web indeed, full of any number of other story lines such as the electrician and his wife, the violent jealousy drama between Laszlo and the two assistants, and even the acrobat contortionist (See 166) If we avoid positing a central character and, therefore, a central gaze, the output leads to a fragmented, or indeed nonexistent, narrative in which the structure of the events rotates with each change of scene. (Jameson 166-167) This fluctuating point of view, then, is truly what creates our ability to not focus on the characters as a false allegory for some specified moral outcome of a plot, but rather allows us to focus on the themes Godard presents and their relation to the structure of the film in general. There are no moral, social or political conclusions (which would in other films presumably result from the characters and plotline) to be drawn about this amalgamation of characters and events. In an entirely postmodern view of this film, the interactions within this amalgamation raise questions about themes and ideas, about the question of what a film

is. (Jameson 178) Godard draws our attention to these questions through the examination of the use of sets (Jerzy remarks that one of the miniatures Just looks flat.), lighting (the lighting never works in Jerzys film), financial backing (note the several scenes in which they search frantically for a buyer in Italy America, etc., as well as those in which the backer shows up and angrily counts up the millions already spent) and the time commitment involved in creating the film-within-a-film, thereby showing not only his own ideas and views of these difficulties of production in the first place, but also highlighting the problem of film as a central focus of Passion. One of the themes used to explore the problem of film is art and the idea of canon. Jerzys film is about the canon of visual and musical art, with the countless restagings of canonical works of art using intricate sets, costuming, and lighting. This alone points out the problem of canon within film; The new production, thenseems to be constitutively tormented by canonical questions, such as what it means to have been turned into a classic (Jameson 162) The question of canon is one that plagues Jerzy, mostly due to the fact that nothing ever seems to go right with the staging of the classics. What is the ultimate goal of compiling canonical paintings into a filmic style and mechanical reproduction? The search is to produce new agglomerations of ever greater and more minute complexity, [which could be] thought to add up to some complete thing. (Jameson 162) The fact that Godard is making this comment is even more poignant, as he was already becoming the object of canonical thinking by this time. Jameson also points out the restaging of artwork through film as proposing films superiority to the other art forms. There would thus be a kind of built-in auto-referentiality in the very cinematographic medium whichinstinctively proposes itself as the fulfillment for the

ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Jameson 159, italics his) The medium itself, as well as its presumptions, already poses a problem for Godard. The theme of art intersects critically with the theme of work. We have several different spaces in the film where work is performed. First, in Isabelles factory, we see a very utilitarian view of work, something with a definite product, where each movement is a means to an end (to produce the product), everything is efficiently organized and clean, and the workers personality and desires are of little importance. Another space in which work is performed is Jerzys movie studio. Here we see the work of the actors, standing absolutely still and recreating precise poses. There is the obsessive search for people who match the physical description of painted figures. We see the costumer, who makes sure the quality of the Italian gowns is good enough to accurately represent the gowns in a painting. There is also Jerzy, forever complaining and dabbling in different lightings, positions, materials for miniatures, and so on. This studio blurs the line between work and art; all of this work goes into creating art, and we can, of course, draw parallels to Godards view of the work that goes into creating art through film. Another interesting character to note is the minor character of Jerzys maid, the Princess. She works, and yet incorporates elements of her art therein; she stretches while collecting dirty dishes, contorts herself while taking down an order, and dances about in the kitchen when Jerzy has asked for his lunch (What about my soup?). This incorporation of art into work seems at times detrimental to the process of work itself and to the output of production, but one cannot help feeling that this type of art-into-work mixture is somehow opposite of or more productive than Jerzys mixture of the two she is creating art of herself, for

the sake of creating art, rather than for the sake of creating an output product or attempting to laud or recreate an artistic canon. What also arises in Godards treatment of film is the idea of pornography, and what constitutes film to be either art or pornography. Inextricable form this is the theme of love, and the appearance of love in work and vice versa. For example, in the factory, Isabelle asks why she never sees people working on TV, why labor is not in the eye of the camera; I believe ultimately that work is the same as pleasure. The same gestures as love, not the same speed. Isabelles comment on the nature of work raises the question of whether it is possible to portray it in such a way as to accurately characterize it. We see the problem of the characterization of work and the deeper implication of pornography in the scene where Hanna acts out different sexual facial expressions on a tape, drawing attention to the mechanical reproducibility inherent in the tape, that is, pointing film out in general to be a kind of voyeurism. Hanna protests this tape and the work that goes into it: The work you have me do is too close to love. The implication here is that Jerzys studio borders on love; the work he does, the recreation of art of the purpose of a film, looks like love if one is able to forget the mechanical means involved. However, the use of a camera necessarily points to the mechanics in creating and capturing such interactions, rather than the idea of love that takes place in private. This point is reiterated in the larger frame of Passion when, after Hanna watches the tape, there seems to be a moment of true intimacy between her and Jerzy, which mirrors the previous reproduction of intimacy. For Hanna, this closeness of work and love is undesirable; it causes her to feel ashamed about showing love through her work, that is, ashamed about showing intimacy through the eyes of mechanical reproduction.

Jerzys near-love work is inextricably tied to the idea of art as work that is, art not for the sake of art, but rather art for the sake of the mechanical reproduction thereof. Jerzys work does not exalt a canon through strict reproduction, however; he embodies once again, the theme of reproduction as a type of impotent pornography. The factory is another place where work becomes something cheaper, something essentially capitalist. For Isabelle, work is her love; she laments early in the film that she would like to do good work, but the fact is that capitalism requires a specific quantitative output from her, which is inherently detrimental for the quality of her work. She is forced to compromise her art (the quality of her work) for the purposes of money in the films late capitalist society. The artistic aspects of work for her simply take a backseat to the demands of the capitalist aspects of volume of output and the necessity of earning income. Of these spaces and characters, the factory is easily the most purposeful in a capitalist, production-oriented sense. There is an output, and people make money to produce a product. One of the characters of the film calls the production of this filmwithin-a-film a production that produces nothing.; this is the view of mechanical reproduction in terms of film, and in this instance the comment is especially potent. The film Jerzy attempts to create is unfinished, given up on; that is, there is absolutely no output in the process of mechanically reproducing true art. When art is work then the work will have no output. In closing, it seems that when we blur the edges between love, work and art, what we get is a muddle of existence, something that can be seen as a truly confused existence. For all its strange premises, however, Passion seems to border on the real with its lack of definite plot, characters and structure, suggesting perhaps that this mixture is the way of

the real world, something we are very familiar with. Indeed these themes are inextricable from Godards world of film production, where one is mechanically reproducing things like love and art of the sake of art itself, and where the question of what this achieves is omnipresent.