ABSTRACT
The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard's film Passion (1982) confronts one with gestures of work and of love between images of a movement hurrying off into open space performed by the airplane in the sky. The gestures are linked with both the camera movement tracing the movement of the plane that has left vapor trail and with Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major accompanying the takes. These different gestural modes of movement Godard interweaves at the beginning of his film constitute the prelude to series of bodies, sounds and images that are also gestures. In addition, this gesture of interruption and retardation exposes the filmic rules of the chain-linking of gestures. In this respect, the dark from which first Hana and then Michel emerge almost at the end of the film to ask Isabelle for Jerzy and Hana, respectively, represents a mode of gesturally chain-linking images that springs from the affective potential of the espace quelconque.
