To Love to Work and to Work to Love — A Conversation about Passion
Passion by talking about the film Jerzy is attempting to make. This is a very strange film; it could be a television Christmas show, where famous paintings are reanimated. But for me it is obvious that these paintings represent cinema, and that they provide Godard with a vehicle for exploring the topic of light. Light is the essence of painting, in the sense that there is a Mediterranean or a Sternberg light. It's something you can't fake the truth and the message of an image or a period in painting. Like you and me, Godard is not interested in the sociohistorical circumstances implicit in the paintings he stages or the contemporary figures who served as their models. Rather, he wants to isolate in them the idea, the movement, or rather the light of cinema. In this sense, the paintings represent cinema. Silverman : In suggesting that the paintings restaged by the film somehow represent cinema you immediately introduced the issue of analogy or resemblance. You proposed, that is, that those images provide a metaphor for cinema. In one of his interviews, Godard reveals that he originally thought of titling the film Passion : The World and its Metaphor , which also implies that metaphor is central to its operations. But what has impressed me most during our various viewings of Passion is not so much its assertion of similitude as its insistent disarticulation of elements which are