Helas Pour Moi 

“Oh, Woe is Me” (1993) is Godard’s Study of the Changing Sensibility of Our Epoch
In the post WWII period of flowering democracy of material prosperity and secular spirituality, people were proud of rituals of mutual tolerance and development of scientific knowledge. But closer to the end of the century: with the growing uncertainty and unpredictability of life and enlarging opportunities to make easy money outside the West (and with the influx of foreigners, represented in the film by Zeus’ entourage) something new happened with the Western soul and Godard was very quick to register it in “Woe”.
What happened is the intensification of interest toward the super-natural (super-human) power. People started to think not about god (they always were believers) but about god’s power, god’s might. They even started to feel the power of (human-made) technology as a super-human might, for example, as we see in the film, the passing ship puts many into a fascinated stupor, the passing train activates in some cartoonish iconoclastic reaction, or the talking pin-ball machine mesmerizes not only characters but also viewers. Swollen interest toward the super-human energies is equally noticeable in different social strata (the literature professor is fixated on finding in poetic texts the taste for super-human perfection, as Rachel Donnadieu, a parishioner and wife of a garage-owner finds super-human aura in her prosaic husband Simon). People’s fixation on technological toys helps the growth of their new pseudo-theological sensitivity.
Rachel’s husband Simon also cannot resist, around his business trip to Far East, this new self-aggrandizing feeling. Is Simon starting to feel himself as Zeus and decided to surprise his wife by suddenly returning to her as God (feeling himself as God), or has Zeus incarnated Himself into poor Simon to spend the night with Simon’s loyal wife? We are not suppose to expect any help from Godard on the level of the plot – “objective” realities are always ambiguous because they are partially produced by human feelings and human perceptions, we unconsciously participate in creating phenomena we perceive as belonging to external world.
Godard’s unbelievable film is like life, impossible and natural. “Woe is Me” helps us not only to understand better our own complexes (and be astonished by another side of our everyday life) but to get a new feeling of our epoch changing in the direction nobody knows. Read articles dedicated to films by Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Pasolini, Cavani, Bunuel, Kurosawa and Bertolucci (with analyses of shots from films) at: www.actingoutpolitics.com By Victor

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

“Oh, Woe is me” by Jean-Luc Godard
The Return of Ancient Pagan Gods into Today’s World and into Godard’s Cinema
“Woe…” is the third film of Godard’s mytho-religious trilogy: “Contempt” (1964), “Hail Mary” (1985), and “Oh, Woe is me” (1993). And it is the second film of the trilogy that deals with pagan imagery – the middle film: “Hail Mary”, is analyzing the Christian belief.
In “Contempt” Godard uses Homer’s “Odysseus” as a precious springboard in an attempt to imagine Odysseus/Ulysses’ destiny in the West of the 60s. Godard stylizes the movie-camera and projection-camera as mythological monsters, and personifies the god Poseidon/Neptune as an American film-producer vis-à-vis the main character as modern Odyssey/Ulysses overburdened by the necessity to keep Gods by psychology (including his own wife) on his shoulders.
In “Woe…” we have a deal with Zeus/Jupiter as the image of unconscious megalomaniacal identification on part of a small businessman. Godard takes us to the heart of people’s psychology that they blindly project outside them by forming today’s cultural trends. We are overwhelmed with Godard’s endless witty and funny examples of the growing taste for association with and being close to - super-human powers masked as human, and of superstitious worship of technology among today’s population. We observe on the screen people’s irradiating irrationality and how it triggers our prejudices and makes us in 20th – 21st centuries psychologically very close to the ancient creators of Olympus. Godard shows that we react on technological power as ancient Greeks perceived Dragons, Cyclops, Hydras or Centaurs, and that like them, but much less metaphorically and for this reason much more violently we want and are trying to be as powerful as Gods.
Read the article about “Oh, Woe is me” – “A New Paganism of the Worship of Technology Intensifies Human Superstitions” (with analysis of shots from the film) at:
www.actingoutpolitics.com
by Victor Enyutin

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike