CANCELED: Passion

All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

BAMPFA Collection

  • Introduction

    While working as a producer with American Zoetrope in the 1980s and ’90s, Tom Luddy coordinated the studio’s collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard. He is the cofounder and codirector of the Telluride Film Festival and a former director and curator of the Pacific Film Archive. 

featuring

Isabelle Huppert, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, Jerzy Radziwilowicz,

Passion was the second film financed from Godard’s aborted Bugsy Siegel project with Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios; the French director even borrowed sets from One from the Heart for a few (ultimately unused) scenes. In this maze of a film-within-a-film, two directors create a movie based on tableaux vivants of famous paintings, but because “you have to live stories before inventing them,” the action quickly moves to the world beyond the frames, where very real dramas of labor and love exist. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Piccoli costar with Hanna Schygulla, the Fassbinder muse whom Godard met when they were both coincidentally visiting Zoetrope.

Jason Sanders
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Jean-Claude Carrière
Cinematographer
  • Raoul Coutard
  • Hans Liechti
Language
  • French
  • German
  • Polish
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • 35mm
  • 87 mins
Source
  • BAMPFA
Permission
  • Gaumont