to the director through a closed window. Links are made between the world of imagination that is being created in the studio and the quotidian world of the characters. The characters playing the producer and the backer keep complaining that there is no plot. To which the director Jerzy replies that life does not have coherent plots, that things just happen, but it is art that can escape this grim cycle and is necessary for that reason. 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. Though life can be drab, full of tensions and misunderstandings, art can soar above it because it can convey pure emotion. As Godard said in 1982: «Sometimes one has to film emotion, to fill the screen with pure emotion. Only painting and music can achieve that.» Light and Dark The opposition of light and dark first appears in the Night Watch, the first of the tableaux vivants, in the context of how light is distributed in the painting. Later on, during the Ingres episode, the two women Isabelle and Hanna are described by Jerzy as the opposition of night and day. According to him, Hanna is like the day, as she is opened towards everything, while Isabelle is like the night because she is difficult to reach. The studio is the place governed by man-made light, whereas the places outside the studio are often shot in inadequate natural light. Yet the lighting of the tableaux vivants in the studio can never reach the qualities of pure natural light outside, and therefore remains artificial. Love and Work The life of the characters is bound by the needs of love and of work, and the ways in which the two get mixed. Jerzy starts an affair with Hanna, owner of the motel where he is staying, and after a screen test wants her to be in his film as well. The industrial nature of the film studio is contrasted with the factory owned by Hanna's husband, at which Isabelle works. Isabelle even suggests that the repetitive movements of manufacturing mirror those of lovemaking. Production Outdoor shooting began at the