The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Offering sounds and images that astonish the senses and tease the mind … For the ​’60s generation, Godard effectively reinvented cinema … Passion brought a chance to (re)discover what all the fuss was about.”

Martyn Auty, Time Out

“Godard’s masterpiece of the 1980s” (Colin McCabe) is a visually sumptuous, bursting-with-ideas rumination on art and commerce (and, of course, filmmaking), featuring Jerzy Radziwilowicz as a Polish director trying to make a film called Passion, a series of tableaux vivants based on masterpieces by Rembrandt, Goya, and Delacroix. Hanna Schygulla (of many of Fassbinder’s key films) is the owner of the French motel where the film’s cast and crew are staying. Michel Piccoli is her husband, a factory owner facing a strike. Isabelle Huppert is the strike organizer. Politics, polemics, adultery, and classical music are all a pungent part of the mix. Passion resumes the extraordinary collaboration between Godard and master nouvelle vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard (celebrating his centenary this year) for the first time in a decade and a half.

In French with English subtitles

“Passion is probably my favorite of the late Godards. That one almost seems like a Dreyer film, completely spiritual.”

Dave Kehr, critic