His producer László is impatient because there is no apparent story to the film and Jerzy keeps delaying and cancelling shoots, repeatedly citing difficulties with the lighting.

During the filming, Jerzy gets involved with two local women: Isabelle, an earnest young factory worker with a stutter, and Hanna, the worldly German owner of the motel where the crew are staying.

László secures more money for the film but Jerzy feels the tug of the dramatic events of the Solidarity movement in Poland and of his family back there.

Though the original paintings which the tableaux vivants portray are frozen in space and time and can be studied at leisure in two dimensions, in silence, the film makes them three-dimensional.

In the background can be glimpsed La Maja Desnuda, exuding sexual allure, while actors are getting ready for Charles IV of Spain and His Family.

Knights on horseback circle restlessly around the set of the Greek city, while Jerzy himself becomes part of the scene when he begins a wrestling match with the actor playing the Angel.

[2] The Embarkation for Cythera is only shown in disjointed fragments, after it becomes evident that the film is never going to be completed, and the camera stays far away, giving a dispassionate documentary air to the empty ship and isolated couples.

The world of the tableaux vivants is that of high art, of rich colours and forms embodied in costumes and props of beauty and accompanied by a soundtrack of masterpieces.

Specific links between art and reality are seen at moments: the armed crusaders entering Constantinople are parallelled by the police suppressing the factory strike; the ship due to sail for Cythera is paired with a jet trail in the sky; the close-ups of Hanna in the motel are matched by zooms on to faces by Goya.

Sophie Loucachevsky, who played the production secretary, recalled: In the frost and the snow we waited outside in underclothes and nightdresses while Godard sat alone in a car and wept, clutching a teddy bear.

[5] Godard had met the German actress Hanna Schygulla in Hollywood when she was shooting One from the Heart with Francis Ford Coppola and asked her to participate, sending her a three-page synopsis in English titled Passion: Work and Love.

For the role of the director, his alter ego, Godard chose the Polish actor Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, well known from his work with Andrzej Wajda.

To the French actress Isabelle Huppert he gave her the role of an unglamorous factory worker who is still a virgin, and added to her difficulties by requiring her to stutter.

Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, collaborating with Godard for the first time since 1967, won the Technical Grand Prize for cinematography at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.