Mary and Joseph

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Movie
German title Mary and Joseph
Original title "Je vous salue, Marie"
Je vous salue, Marie.svg
Country of production Switzerland , France
original language French
Publishing year 1984
length Main part: 76 minutes.
Supporting film: 27 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jean-Luc Godard (main part)
Anne-Marie Miéville (The Book of Mary)
script Jean-Luc Godard (main part)
Anne-Marie Miéville (The Book of Mary)
production Jean-Luc Godard
music Pieces by JS Bach
and Antonín Dvořák
camera Jean-Bernard Menoud
cut Anne-Marie Miéville
occupation

The book of Mary

Bulk

Maria und Joseph ( "Je vous salue, Marie" ) is a Swiss - French feature film by the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from 1984. Godard paraphrases the biblical story of Mary and Joseph of Nazareth and the virgin birth of Jesus into the present and into the present Near Geneva , where the filmmaker grew up as a Protestant . In a second storyline, a professor rejects evolution , the scientific explanation for the origin of humans.

Because the film is based on Catholic dogma and shows the protagonist naked, it provoked some violent protests from conservative Catholics. Pope John Paul II saw the Virgin Mary degraded, but there was also encouragement for the work in Catholic circles. The film literature understands this film less as a contribution to a religious topic than as an exploration of the possibilities of using the medium of film to express the unrepresentable. In doing so, Godard uses unconventional stylistic devices such as a meandering narrative style or chopped up music that contradicts the images in order to force viewers out of familiar patterns of reception , as well as simple images of nature, humor and irony. The work has stimulated authors from various disciplines to numerous interpretations. Godard's main film is preceded by a short film by his companion Anne-Marie Miéville on the subject of maternal love.

Anne-Marie Miévilles The Book of Mary

Jean-Luc Godard's long-time colleague and partner Anne-Marie Miéville shot the short film The Book of Mary (Le livre de Marie) of 27 minutes in parallel with Maria and Joseph . She used almost the same staff as Godard. The cinemas showed the short film and then the 76-minute main film as a seamless program; both parts can also be seen in one piece in DVD editions.

Aurore Clément and Bruno Cremer play the parents of eleven-year-old Marie - the family lives in a house on Lake Geneva . The parents quarrel about their responsibilities within the family until they decide that the father will move out of the house. The girl defiantly refuses to take note of this and takes refuge in reciting verses from Baudelaire's book of poems, The Flowers of Evil, on existential topics and listening to the music of Chopin and Mahler . It expresses their fear in an excited dance performance. The mother explains to the child that their name is Marie because the name is an anagram of aimer (French for love ).

Some film critics consider The Book of Mary a kind of prologue to Godard's main film. Wolfram Schütte speaks in this context of a prelude , of an overture . Other critics say, however, that this classification would underestimate the short film. He prepares the audience motivically, emotionally and formally for the main film. The parents' marriage dissolves because they fail to understand each other.

When her parents split up, Marie experiences the first shock in her life. The poetry and music with which she deals are hardly credible to an eleven-year-old child. The film magazine epd Film interpreted the girl's condition in such a way that she already carried the secret of maternal love within herself without even having suspected it; the separation of her parents makes her aware of the existence of this love. Finally, Miéville's Marie decapitates an egg at the dining table and Godard's main film follows on from this shot. The Virgin Mary gave birth to the God who is her father, commented Cynthia Erb: “At this last moment Miéville gives birth to God art, who is her artistic father, whose immeasurable status she always overshadows and her work is marginalized. "

action

Starting position

Rolle , a small town not far from Geneva . The young Marie is the daughter of a petrol station tenant and plays in the netball team. She has a fiancé, the taxi driver Joseph, with whom she has never had sexual intercourse. Joseph, a high school dropout, well dressed, with pomade in his hair and sunglasses, has a second relationship with Juliette. She wants to deepen the relationship, but Joseph shows less and less interest in her. One day two mysterious strangers arrive by plane and behave like a rowdy: The Archangel Gabriel and his little companion. They announce to Marie that she will have a child ...

Further course

Besides the story about Marie and Joseph, the film has a subplot that is hardly linked to the main plot. One professor finds scientific explanations for the origin of life unconvincing: “We were not suddenly born into an amino acid soup. [...] Life is wanted, desired, planned and programmed by a determined intelligence. ”He considers evolutionary, coincidental development to be impossible due to the lack of the necessary time. To clarify, he has a student spin a Rubik's cube with closed eyes . The student Eva tells him for every movement whether it is right or wrong. Within minutes, he brings the cube into the target position, which would not have been possible without your input. Later the professor visits Eva at her home in the “Villa Paradis”. They ponder philosophy and get involved with each other.

Marie accepts the miracle, even if she neither understands nor can explain it. The gynecologist is amazed when he finds Marie virginity and pregnancy at the same time. On the other hand, Joseph believes that she sleeps with other guys: "I hope they at least have big cocks!" He struggles with being seen as a cuckold idiot. Marie insists that she has not slept with anyone and eludes his need for physical closeness. The angel tries Joseph with slaps inculcating trust and love. After separating from Juliette, Joseph declares his love for Marie; she accuses him of still not believing in the miracle. When the couple are getting ready to get married, he begs to see them completely naked at least once. She allows him. But his attempt to touch her is stopped by suddenly appearing Gabriel, who also assists Maria as a guardian angel. Only when Joseph tamed his desire for Marie's body and held his hand two centimeters from her belly did she explain to him that it was love. Still not fully understanding, he gradually fits into the role assigned to him. He promises Marie to stay with her and not to touch her. Meanwhile the professor separates from Eva in order to return to his family. Marie has to cope with the pain that she has to celibate. After the onset of winter, Marie gives birth to the child. Years later, the boy named Jesus is defiant and naughty, and Joseph leads a joyless married life. One day the child exclaims: “I have to take care of my father's business!” And leaves Marie and Joseph. She takes it. With a “Hail, Maria!” Gabriel gives her a hint that her mission is over. In the car she lights a cigarette and puts on red lipstick; the film ends with a shot of her wide open, round mouth.

Formal conception

Pictures of nature and of Marie's body

Between the scenes with the protagonists, Godard inserts numerous images of nature: a tree in the landscape; Stones thrown into the water causing waves; an airplane flying over tree tops and power lines; Sunsets; swaying stalks in the field; Hedgehog in the grass. They are simple, strongly stylized images that elevate the everyday to the heavenly. With the picture of the setting sun, in front of which an airplane flies, he found a metaphor for Marie's fertilization. While he quoted symbols from pop culture and advertising in his films of the 1960s, he used very original symbols in Maria and Joseph . He set up the camera and spent a long time waiting for something extraordinary to show up in the simple scenes. He was on the lookout for immaculate, nascent signs that have no meaning yet.

The motif of the circle and the round is repeated in the sun, moon, basketball and Marie's belly. For Gertrud Koch from epd Film , the actress Myriem Roussel has the ideal Marian body, "curved hips, full breasts, an almost child-like waist and a long, narrow neck with an elegant neckline from the back, slightly angular, still girlish knees." For Antoine De Baecque, beauty is the first miracle in this film. Godard stated that he did not want to show a naked woman, but human flesh. Some settings are intended as anatomical drawings. He rejected the idea of ​​showing Joseph naked too, because it would have misled the audience into assuming that Joseph and Mary were having sexual intercourse. "Besides, I'm a man and I like to look at naked women!"

Bach and Dvořák with dropouts

More than other directors, Godard regards images, dialogues, music and sounds as individually manipulable. The cuts of the picture and the noises on the sound track are often asynchronous; At first glance, images and music appear to be randomly combined. The classical pieces of music are used in the form of abrupt fades into the middle of these pieces. Often they are not played out over a longer period of time, but rather broken up by playing them off and on again several times in a row. The fragmented images and the cough-and-hott soundtrack aim to throw the audience out of habitual, comfortable patterns of perception.

The music consists largely of instrumental, in the first third also choral pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach , which are connected to Marie. Godard justified his choice of Bach's music with the fact that “historically Bach was the music of Martin Luther ”, who would have attacked the Catholic Church, among other things, because of its image policy - failing to recognize that Luther lived around two centuries before Bach. Godard used a single work by Antonín Dvořák , the Cello Concerto in B minor (op. 104). The “romantic” piece of music can be heard in passages that deal with Joseph's learning process. According to Jürg Stenzl, it is therefore "his" music, "which has changed from the stormy forwards thrust in the first movement to complete internalization, the pure, singing horn sound." on the one hand and Dvořák's eruptive, immediately »romantic« expression on the other. ”During his evening with Eva, the professor played jazz by John Coltrane .

Biblical reference, collage style and comedy

The subtitle “At that time” appears ten times in the film

The Bible provides only a few details about Mary and especially about Joseph's life, so that a full-length film inevitably has to be invented. In the plot it remains open what kind of relationship Marie and Joseph actually have to one another, how literally or symbolically the terms “virginity” and “touching” are to be understood, or how the pregnancy really comes about. On the one hand, Mary and Joseph can be understood as a modern story, as the story of a woman named Marie, who is similar to the biblical Mary, but not identical with her. The action is not set in the Holy Land , but in Switzerland, in the present, in everyday life and in the profane. This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the " Greetings you, Maria " in the original title is placed in quotation marks. At the same time, the film leaves open the possibility that a biblical, divine story actually takes place here. The protagonists are simple, ordinary people like Jesus' parents two thousand years ago. This is reinforced by the subtitle En ce temps là (“at that time”) that is faded in ten times at various points in the film .

It is not a conventional, straightforward narrative, but a “scene collage” that changes direction frequently and violently between the storylines around Marie / Joseph, around the Professor / Eva and the images of nature, jumping over longer periods of time and making omissions and digressions apparently irrelevant. The film contains an abundance of hints. Occasionally Godard flashes unobtrusive humor. When the professor claims that human origins are cosmic, we are all aliens, we see the back of a student's head with a blonde pineapple hairstyle. Growing older, Godard more often resorted to set pieces of comedy, a genre that softens male characters, sometimes even feminizes them. The exchanges between Joseph and Gabriel are often absurd. Both men have a companion figure: Joseph a dog to whom he reads, Gabriel the angelic girl who admonishes him if he gets mixed up and who keeps the files for him. These companions often make Joseph and Gabriel appear silly and childish. Cynthia Erb referred to the commonality between male comedy and “art porn”. Both genres use bodies in a spectacular way, creating a contrast between body control and its loss. In Maria and Joseph there is tension between Joseph's unfulfilled desire to see Marie's body and the art porn insertions "which allow the viewer to see everything about Marie, over and over again."

genesis

Already in Godard's two previous films - Passion (1982) and first name Carmen (1983) - the young Myriem Roussel , who was trained as a classical dancer, had appearances, first as an extra, then in a supporting role. The director fell in love with her, wrote to her and made a lot of phone calls. She was his muse, he was her fatherly friend. He involved her in developing a film project about a father's incestuous desire for his daughter. In regular test recordings he played the father and she played the daughter. Roussel did not want to get involved in a sexual relationship with Godard. After a few months, Godard realized that the project had failed. Roussel sees the origin of Mary and Joseph here : "He remains the father, God, but has no desire to commit incest with her, because she gives birth virginally." After this turn in the professional field, their relationship took on a different character. Roussel fell in love with the director, they became lovers.

Godard offered his longtime companion Anne-Marie Miéville , who was hostile to his relationship with Roussel, to make her own short film. They did some of the preparations together, such as research on the subject of virgin births. Roussel was set as the leading actress. Godard gave her scientific, especially medical and theological, as well as literary texts to be read aloud. When casting the Joseph role, Godard first thought of an older man like himself and offered it to the 70-year-old Jean Marais . His astonishment at the suggestion led the director to consider someone younger. The 35-year-old philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy turned it down because he was worried about his reputation. Godard rehearsed with the actor Jacques Dutronc , but renounced him because Dutronc would have given Joseph too much charisma. Roussel finally put the beginner Thierry Rode , whom she knew from theater lessons.

The shooting turned out to be the longest in Godard's career and dragged on from January to June 1984. Because he had filmed Paris and its streets so often, he decided to shoot Maria and Joseph in Switzerland, where he grew up. Most of the recordings were made in and around Rolle and Nyon . In fact, the film was only shot two to three days a week. In the rest of the time the director was busy with other things or didn't feel like shooting and rehearsed with Roussel. She felt that she was being treated unfairly and frustrated because she was unsatisfied with his acting, and so she did not like her own performance. That he had complete confidence in Miéville made her jealous. She did not hide her growing aversion to the project, for which she was angry with Godard. "We sniffed at each other." It was clear to her that it would be their last work together, "a separation gift, the last words of love". In early May 1984 she met her future husband, whom she would marry a year later.

Godard, as his own producer, raised the funds for making the film himself; it provided a cost of $ 200,000. Due to the lengthy filming and lurking for pictures in nature, he exceeded the budget and had to interrupt work. In order to earn money for the completion, he agreed against his conviction in the proposal of the producer Alain Sarde to take over the directing of the commercial film Détéctive . This shoot took place in August and September 1984. Then he was able to resume work on Mary and Joseph ; in the end it came to a total cost of $ 600,000. “I've used 90,000 meters of film - that's usually enough for four films. I am not religious, but I am a believer. I believe in pictures. I have no children, only films. "

Reactions from the Church and Criticism

Protests from angry Catholics

While Jesus had already been treated and depicted as a character in numerous films, especially in the 1950s, Godard made the first film ever made about Mary and Joseph about the virgin birth and her relationship with Joseph. The film was shown a few times for the press in late 1984 and opened in theaters in France on January 23, 1985.

The work sparked protests from conservative Catholic circles who accused it of blasphemy, profanity and derision of the Christian faith. In Versailles , angry Catholics interrupted a performance, threw stink bombs and started fights. The French municipal law enabled mayors to prohibit a film from being shown if it disrupted public order. The mayor of Versailles was just on a trip to Asia; his first deputy imposed a temporary performance ban in the community. The organizations "Confédération nationale des associations familiales catholiques" and "Alliance générale contre le racisme et pour le respect de l'identité française et chrétienne", which were close to the Integralists and the right-wing extremist Front National , attempted a nationwide performance ban by means of an injunction to obtain. After watching the film, the Paris High Court denied her request because not a single scene was pornographic or obscene. A number of Catholic associations jointly turned to the bishops to take action against the film because of "scenes that are unbearable for Christians" and "incredibly rough language". The higher clergy did not support the request and spoke out against the use of force. Nevertheless, Catholics disturbed numerous performances - in France the work ran in around a hundred halls - with singing, prayers, stink bombs and bomb threats or bags of paint thrown onto the canvas; they set fires in Tours . Godard interpreted the debate that had arisen in the media as a sign of life from the cinema and assured him that he sincerely respects the faith of Catholics. In the first ten weeks, 260,000 people saw the film in Paris alone.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, Catholic citizens' groups tried to get the film banned. A Fulda cinema owner took him out of the program after protests. In front of a Freiburg cinema, some Catholics remained praying for four weeks with an atonement cross during each performance. There were also protests in Spain, Italy and Greece, although the opponents only managed to avert performances in isolated cases; in Rome they beat up the manager of a cinema. In Brazil, the president imposed a performance ban.

Pope John Paul II had the film shown. At the end of April 1985 he announced on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano : “The film offends and disfigures the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith and profaned its spiritual and historical value, and deeply offends the religious feelings of believers and the respect for the sacred and the Virgin Mary, venerated so much by Catholics and so dear to Christians. ”The Pope declared his spiritual bond with the protesters and gave them the apostolic blessing . A few days later he held a public prayer to remedy the desecration of Mary by the film. It was the first time a Pope had turned against a single film. The Vatican was bothered by Mary's nakedness and her reaction to the proclamation; he stated that the Virgin Mary was united to God and prepared for her task. According to Godard biographer De Baecque, the director was flattered: “He could boast of having established a kind of dialogue among equals […] between the Pope of Catholics and the Pope of Artists.” Godard recognized the city of Rome as “a house of the Church ”and stated:“ The Pope has a special relationship with Mary, whom he regards at least as his daughter. ”After 200,000 Italians had visited the film, the local distributor stopped showing after an agreement with Godard.

Affirmative ecclesiastical voices

At the 1985 Berlinale , Maria and Joseph received the Otto Dibelius Film Prize from the International Evangelical Film Jury. The jury of the International Catholic Film Organization ( Organization Catholique Internationale du Cinéma , OCIC) did not award a prize, but expressed itself in a communication as follows: “With full awareness of the difficulties that many viewers can face, both in terms of formal originality and subject matter , the jury agreed that it was important to express their interest in this work and to recommend an unbiased and critical examination of it. Because the director tries with great care and sincere respect to get closer to basic human experiences, especially the secret of love and life, by making use of well-known biblical figures and statements of faith. In doing so, he succeeds in convincingly bringing together fragile relationships between sensuality and untouchedness, scientific thinking and metaphysical perceptions, modern everyday life and spiritual dimensions. "

The film commissioner of the Evangelical Church in Germany , Hans Werner Dannowski, pointed out that the virgin birth can only be understood in its full context, that the peculiarity of Jesus is rooted in his special origin, from God. “The story of the virgin birth refers 'as such' to God”, who is entering human life at this moment. This context is hardly known to the enlightened person, for him "the doctrine of the virgin birth is more a cause for doubt than an aid to belief." And because the story of the virgin birth no longer speaks of itself, it has lost its self-evidence increasingly dogmatized them in the Roman Catholic Church . This is where Godard comes in: The virgin birth has no recognizable purpose in the film and, like Joseph, is a mystery to Marie. The film shows consequences, but not the triggering causes, which the viewer then asks about. “The thing behind is there, you can feel it, but it remains a mystery. (…) The experience of reality remains a fragment. ”The allusions to the Bible also remained fragmentary, never malicious or aggressive, often ironic, rather cheerful. The experience of God consists of pieces that do not want to fit together, no longer make sense as a whole. The film commissioner saw in this the reason that believers who orientate themselves on the clear biblical version were angry about the film. But Godard had precisely captured the religious situation of the present.

Judgments of the film review

The filmdienst , organ of the Catholic film journalism, saw two different stories in Godard's film plot and the biblical story of salvation, which parallels might lead to misunderstandings. It is not about a parody, but about “the healing smashing of flat concepts of reality” in order to rediscover the wonderful in everyday life. “Godard teaches us not to be too naive to trust our eyes and ears, to always 'think along' other levels and interpretations.” The fact that he touches dogmas is “ultimately peripheral legibility when viewed as a whole”. The film-dienst certified the director, who creates a “Christian-oriented mythology of creation and motherhood”, that he describes “the woman very intimately with indescribable tenderness: an undisguised but sovereign anti-pornographic look at the mystery of the feminine. This is as poetic as it is 'provocative'; and what is 'more provocative' than the mystery, the innocence and the wonderful? ”In a film review without a clear judgment, the evangelical epd Film stated that the strip was neither voyeuristic nor did it reveal blasphemous intentions. "Godard doesn’t resist this or that obvious irony, but it almost exclusively relates to the narrative techniques of the legend, to the discrepancy between a concrete story and an unreal content." With this irony Godard re-establishes the myth even more. The non-denominational Zoom called the “multi-layered” film “an extraordinary achievement”. He sometimes finds images for the unrepresentable, makes the origin and the secret of life visible as well as the incarnation of the spiritual in man.

The French film magazines judged less favorably. According to Positif, Godard does not always escape the dangers of the mannered , the wrong and the platitudes. A few picture games testify to inventiveness, but overall the film is mediocre boring. In the Cahiers du cinéma , where Godard had once worked as a critic himself, one recognized his high ambitions. But Godard creates individual images of Marie that do not result in a whole and cancel one another out. He wanted to see her sometimes stormy, then passively again; sometimes it should be his creation and soon it should represent the divine creation. "He demands of the actress to give (him) everything at the same time while preserving her mystery."

Film journalistic interpretations

Thematic consistency in Godard's work

Jean-Luc Godard was already working as a filmmaker for over a quarter of a century when he created Maria and Joseph . In the 1960s he attacked cinematic conventions and revolutionized film language ; from around 1967 he represented a radical Marxism . After a phase of experimental films in the 1970s, he returned to cinema in 1980. Instead of sociological or political themes, there were primarily aesthetic ones, painting (in passion ) and music (in first name Carmen ). Although Godard did not conceive these two films and Maria and Joseph as a trilogy, Marc Cersisuelo called them the "trilogy of the sublime" because the director is concerned with the question of beauty and its portrayal.

Mary and Joseph is not a Christian film, much less Catholic or theological, but neither is it blasphemous or atheistic. Godard treats the dogma of the virgin birth without judgment. He was raised as a Calvinist Protestant but described himself as non-practicing. The Bible is a great book that speaks strongly of today's events. “Maybe I needed a story that was bigger than me.” The lack of an approach critical of religion made religion skeptics doubt Godard. One was amazed that of all people an iconoclast and cinematic heretic like him had planned this material. In part, the impression was created that he had traded Marxism for mysticism and belief in the divine. The protests of arch-Catholic circles can be all the more astonishing as, with some of the professor's statements, he brings creationist positions into the lecture hall.

With Maria and Joseph , Godard continues his attempts to draw the attention of his audience to film production and film language instead of making pleasing films . In this sense, his work is an educational project. The Catholic myth of Mary offered him a new vehicle to fathom artistic expression and to escape the paradigms of conventional culture. He pursued the question of how that which exists beyond the material and cannot be shown visually can be represented through the medium of film. The fact that the film was misunderstood as Godard's departure from his principles was, according to Kevin Moore, proof of his unbroken originality and his ability to question familiar patterns of interpretation.

After the screening at the 1985 Berlinale, the film critic Wolfram Schütte came to the conclusion that Godard, along with Maria and Joseph, had committed to the spiritualistic cinematic art of the directors Dreyer and Tarkowski . But Godard is by no means taking an affirmative turn with his film, nor is he even a renegade or convert .

Film art as a struggle for innocence

Right from the start, the characters' lives are in the hands of someone who organizes and controls it, a god or a director. The composed images of nature give the creative power of a deity and a filmmaker appearance. Godard seems to enjoy his godlike position as a director. In a supervision he shows Marie naked in the bathtub while she speaks on the soundtrack: “Meanwhile I felt a kind of joy in presenting my body to the gaze of the one who had become my master forever. And I looked up to this wonderful creature, because that's what he was from here to all eternity. ”At the same time, pregnant Marie is a symbol for the artist who passionately seeks to create something new out of himself. One can read the story of Mary as a metaphor for filmmaking. In French, unexposed film material is called pellicule vierge , literally “virgin film”.

A point of reference to Godard's works from the first half of the 1960s is the scene in which pregnant Marie is examining lipsticks in a shop without buying any. In doing so, she discards a commodity that is associated with consumerist materialism and femininity defined by external masquerades. Godard had addressed prostitution several times ( The Story of Nana S. , 1962 and Two or Three Things I Know About Her , 1966) and advocated a cinema that did not “prostitute” itself as commercial entertainment. Hervé Le Roux said that in the fight against the flood of images in advertising, cinema can only win with an innocence and virginity that it does not constantly threaten to lose, but that it can win over and over again. Godard found settings of great purity with the images of the sun, the moon and the sky, and showed a naked woman without fabricating a men's magazine. In contrast, Alain Bergala found that Godard failed with his claim to create a fresh picture of Marie and to avoid the siege by commercial images, even in contemporary cinema. In the 1960s, for example, he succeeded with Anna Karina , but it has now become almost impossible to capture the beauty or secret of a young woman.

According to David Sterritt, Miéville and Godard both wanted to capture the echo of a non-physical and non-psychological reality in their film parts. “Because the means of expression in the cinema are based on materiality and physical appearance, this plan necessarily entails denying or eliminating normal cinematic mechanisms and methods.” Marie remains open to all possibilities of love through her chastity. This love is not a negative act, but a highly positive and courageous one, like Godard and Miéville's film style. This is characterized by openness to ambiguity and the willingness to avoid the formal reductionisms on which the majority of narrative cinema relies. Both parts of the film are "not a representation, but an exploration".

Women, men and determination

Sketch of the often mentioned take in the film, in which Joseph does not touch Marie's stomach and holds his hand in front of it

Godard defines the differences between the sexes as binary pairs of opposites, male / female stands for active / passive, culture / nature, mind / body and logic / intuition, among other things. Godard: “Women [...] accept more. While men always have the feeling that they have things under control and have to understand them. ”While Marie accepts her destiny without long hesitation and with openness, the dumb Joseph takes longer to accept the unbelievable. “It must be from me!” He shouts, although he should know better. Like the character of the same name in the first name Carmen , he does not have the means and the intelligence to own the woman he desperately loves and is sexually frustrated. His change from jealous fiancé to platonic helper, his renunciation of sex with Marie is an act of faith in the film.

Another dichotomy, between knowing and not knowing, exists among the male characters. Opposed to Joseph is the professor, who has both rational knowledge and the body of a desired woman. This woman, Eva, in turn seduces him because she is out to acquire knowledge. She is curious, and curiosity undermines a belief system. But the professor incessantly wrongly names Eva Eve and hides from her that he has a family. Godard thus describes Eva as a "ultimately wrongly named, misunderstood and ripped off woman." In this way he thwarts and reverses Catholic schemes, because in his film Mary appears to Joseph like a femme fatale , while the seductress Eva becomes a victim becomes. For Cynthia Erb, Godard's Marie is not quite as active as Marie Miévilles: “Miéville focuses on Maria as a thinking, perceiving being, while Godard seems more interested in Maria's body. […] But the strengths of the two films stem from the filmmakers' common tendency to activate the Marian myth in a way that neither makes it ridiculous nor overturns it in a simple way. Miéville's film is the more remarkable achievement, as it takes on the difficult task of discovering a clever and tenacious representative within one of the most recalcitrant myths of Christianity [...] and using its fascinating aspects for feminist purposes. "

In the first name Carmen, a man suffered from his desire for a self-determined woman. Godard: “Carmen is more like the idea that men have of women. And with Marie it's more about the fact that men cannot imagine what women are like. ”According to Laura Mulvey , Carmen and Marie represent the secret of the feminine. “The two women, as opposite as they are as femme fatale and ascetic saints, are bitterly desired by a man and are incomprehensible to him. Both stand for the mystery of the feminine and the difficulty of seeing the soul through the body. ”Although Godard had shown in his early work that cinema is only a surface and revealed the mechanisms by which it creates its illusions,“ always was something stubborn in Godard's portrayal of women, a 'something more' that eludes political reasoning. It is as if he can only bring a woman to the screen if he finds her fascinating and seductive. ”The Godardian woman always deceives, plays something and hides her secret behind her appearance. With Marie, Godard constructed another embodiment of his ideal of female beauty. But his severity and honesty mark the fact that at the end of the film he admitted the impossibility of this construction due to Marie's transformation into an ordinary woman. On the other hand, Ellen Drapper didn't like the movie. She found herself in the uncomfortable position of seeing Marie exhibited physically and emotionally, while cuts and angles kept the viewer at a distance from her. Marie's secret may stand for the limits of male knowledge, “but does it have to stand for the cinematic cogito of women?” The film lacks depth; "Its contradictions and contradictions are all on the surface, and its philosophical dilemma is predictable, if not exhausting."

Another reading reveals that the foreword in the book L'évangile au risque de la psychanalyse (1977) by the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto Godard served as a starting point and quarry. He took over some text passages exactly as film dialogues. Dolto also suggested that the gospel educates its readers (or a director its audience) not by providing explanations, but by letting them learn secrets. According to Dolto, Joseph and Mary are a mythical model for any couple. In a couple relationship without possession over the other and without dependencies, the needs of the partners always remained partially unmet. Every pregnant woman hopes that her child will be special. Since Mary does not develop a possessiveness regarding Jesus, Jesus is an example of the development of the child into an adult being who one day leaves the parents. The child is not owned by his mother or father. Moreover, every man is never sure whether he is the producer; he must trust the woman's words and accept the child, adopting it as it were. The biblical mythical story and the film show that motherhood and fatherhood of ordinary people is something extraordinary.

The little companion Gabriels instructed Marie: “Sois dure, sois pure!”, She should be hard and stay pure. Annie Goldmann said: “But Marie is of human flesh; she has a woman's desires, so the chastity she imposes on herself weighs on her. ”When she cramps up in bed and writhes in the sheets, she struggles against the temptation of masturbation to the point of exhaustion. Her spirituality is not damaged by this, on the contrary, Marie reaches “the mystery of the spirit” through the fight against herself and rises in relation to others. If everything had been given to her, if everything had been easy, her earnings would be lower. ”By not portraying her as the mere recipient of the Annunciation, Godard overcomes the traditionally passive image of the figure of Mary. Her convulsions resemble the dance of Miévilles Marie; Both parts of the film reject the ecclesiastical statement of Mary as a blissful receptacle for the will of God.

After Jesus' departure, Marie seems to have arrived back on earth. Your task as a holy being is finished. She wears a new curly hairstyle, elegant clothes and paints her lips. For the wide open mouth of the final shot, an obvious interpretation is the Freudian interpretation that the lipstick is a phallic symbol and the mouth signals your readiness for sexual experiences. With its black emptiness the mouth can also evoke horror. Last but not least, it can be read as a sign that the meaning of the film remains open.

literature

  • Antoine de Baecque: Godard. Biography. Bernard Grasset , Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-246-64781-2 , pp. 623–633 (French; on the background of the film and the relationship between Roussel and Godard)
  • Anne-Marie Pecoraro: Les démêlés judicaires de “Je vous salue, Marie”: un Pater et deux Ave pour Godard . In: CinémAction No. 52: Le cinéma selon Godard , pp. 39–45 (French; on the protests and the legal background in France)
  • Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (Eds.): Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary. Women in the sacred film. Southern Illinois University Press , Carbondale 1993, ISBN 0-8093-1824-5 (English; collection of articles on the film)
  • Hans Werner Dannowski : Faith as a Fragment . In: epd Film June 1985, pp. 21-22 (explains the theological background of the virgin birth and its traces in Godard's film)

medium

  • DVD: Jean-Luc Godard collection, No. 2. Universum Film, Munich 2006. French and German sound, German subtitles.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antoine de Baecque: Godard. Biography. Bernard Grasset, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-246-64781-2 , p. 625
  2. ↑ epd Film April 1985, p. 33; Zoom April 1985, pp. 25-28; Dixon 1991, p. 153
  3. ↑ so also on the DVD Jean-Luc Godard Collection no.2 , Universum 2006
  4. ^ A b c Kevin Z. Moore: Reincarnating the Radical. Godard's “Je vous salue Marie” , in: Cinema Journal, University of Texas Press, Austin, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall 1994, pp. 18-30
  5. ↑ a b c Wolfram Schütte : Maria and Joseph to the Orinoco. In: Frankfurter Rundschau No. 48 of February 26, 1985, p. 7.
  6. ↑ Ellen Drapper: An Alternative to Godard's Metaphysics , in: Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (eds.): Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary. Women in the sacred film . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1993, ISBN 0-8093-1824-5 , p. 69; Vlada Petric and Geraldine Bard: Godard's Vision of the New Eve , in: Locke / Warren 1993, p. 101
  7. ^ David Sterritt: Miéville and Godard: From Psychology to Spirit . In: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 56-57
  8. ↑ a b c d e f Wheeler Winston Dixon: The films of Jean-Luc Godard . State University of New York Press, Albany 1997, ISBN 0-7914-3286-6 , pp. 153-162
  9. ↑ Alain Bergala: La fin d'une enfance , in: Cahiers du cinéma , in January 1985, of, p.17
  10. ↑ Drapper 1993, p. 69
  11. ↑ Sterritt 1999, pp. 164-187
  12. ↑ a b c Gertrud Koch: Maria und Joseph , in epd Film , April 1985, p. 33
  13. ↑ Cynthia Erb: The Madonna's reproduction (s): Miéville, Godard, and the figure of Mary . In: Journal of Film and Video , vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 1993, p. 47.
  14. ↑ Inez Hedges: Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary: Cinema's “virgin birth” , in: Locke / Warren 1993, p. 65
  15. ↑ a b c Film Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2, Winter 1985/1986, pp. 2-6
  16. ↑ a b c d e f g h Godard in conversation with Film Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, winter 1985/1986, pp. 2–6
  17. ↑ Marc Cerisuelo: Jean-Luc Godard . Editions des Quatre-vingts, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-907468-08-1 , p. 226; Film Quarterly, p. 4; Mulvey 1993, p. 48
  18. ↑ De Baecque 2010, p. 628
  19. ↑ Sterritt 1993, p. 57
  20. ^ A b Charles Warren: Whim, god and the screen , in: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 10-26
  21. ↑ Sterritt 1999, p. 200
  22. ↑ a b Jürg Stenzl: Jean-Luc Godard - musicien. The music in the films of Jean-Luc Godard . Edition text + kritik, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-86916-097-9 , pp. 209–223
  23. ↑ Maryel Locke: A history of the public controversy , in: Locke / Warren 1993, p 1; Godard in Film Quarterly 1985
  24. ↑ a b Warren 1993, pp. 24-25
  25. ^ A b c David Sterritt: The films of Jean-Luc Godard. Seeing the invisible . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, ISBN 0-521-58038-2 , pp. 214-220
  26. ↑ a b c Zoom, No. 5, March 6, 1985, p. 1.
  27. ↑ a b c Locke 1993, p. 1
  28. ↑ Goldmann 1989, p. 75
  29. ↑ Warren 1993, p. 13, Goldmann 1989, p. 75; Petric and Bard 1993, pp. 106-107
  30. ↑ Der Spiegel No. 6/1985, February 4, 1985, p. 194: Ochs und Eselein ; Sterritt 1999, p. 169 speaks of a "collagen film"
  31. ↑ Warren 1993, p. 23
  32. ↑ Sterritt 1999, p. 169; Petric and Bard 1993, p. 103
  33. ↑ a b Erb 1993, pp. 51-52
  34. ↑ Sterritt 1999, p. 177; also according to Goldmann 1989, p. 77, humor has its place in film
  35. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 53
  36. ↑ De Baecque 2010, pp. 612-614
  37. ↑ De Baecque 2010, pp. 613 and 624-625
  38. ↑ De Baecque 2010, p. 625
  39. ↑ De Baecque 2010, p. 626
  40. ^ Myriem Roussel cited in De Baecque 2010, pp. 626–627
  41. ↑ De Baecque 2010, p. 626
  42. ↑ François Nemer: Godard (le cinéma) . Gallimard, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-07-030780-8 , p. 147
  43. ↑ Locke 1993, pp. 1-2; for the premiere also De Baecque 2010, p. 629
  44. ^ Anne-Marie Pecoraro: Les démêlés judicaires de "Je vous salue, Marie": un Pater et deux Ave pour Godard . In: CinémAction No. 52: Le cinéma selon Godard , pp. 39-45; Zoom, No. 4, February 20, 1985, pp. 25-28; De Baecque 2010, pp. 629-631; the reasoning of the higher court can be found in Le Figaro of January 29, 1985, p. 28: Godard, l'absolution . Quoted in: Locke 1993, pp. 2-3.
  45. ↑ De Baecque 2010, pp. 630-632
  46. ↑ Der Spiegel No. 22/1985, May 27, 1985, p. 190: Protests against Godard-Film
  47. ↑ Locke 1993, p. 3; Sterritt 1999, p. 164
  48. ↑ Sterritt 1999, p. 166; De Baecque 2010, p. 632
  49. ^ L'Osservatore Romano, April 30, 1985, p. 1
  50. ↑ Locke 1993, pp. 4-5
  51. ↑ De Baecque 2010, p. 633
  52. ↑ Hans Werner Dannowski: Faith as a Fragment, in: epd Film June 1985, pp. 21-22
  53. ↑ H. Haslberger: Maria und Joseph , in: film-dienst , No. 9/1985
  54. ↑ Zoom No. 4/1985 , review by Thomas Maurer
  55. ^ Alain Masson: Je vous salue, marie , in: Positif, March 1985, p. 73
  56. ↑ a b Alain Bergala: Si près du secret , in: Cahiers du cinéma, January 1985, pp. 14-16
  57. ↑ Cerisuelo 1989, p. 207
  58. ↑ De Baecque 2010, pp. 628-629
  59. ↑ Cerisuelo 1989, p. 231; Zoom No. 5 1985
  60. ↑ Der Spiegel No. 6 1985; epd Film, April 1985, p. 33, Moore 1994, p. 18
  61. ↑ Moore 1994, pp. 18-19; Sterritt 1999, p. 170
  62. ↑ Sterritt 1999, pp. 217-218
  63. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 52 left column
  64. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 53; Sterritt 1999, p. 186; Position in the film around the 56th minute of the total length of the opening and main film
  65. ↑ a b Hedges 1993, pp. 61-62
  66. ↑ Sterritt 1999, p. 194
  67. ^ Hervé Le Roux: Le trou de la vierge ou Marie telle que Jeannot la peint . In: Cahiers du cinéma , January 1985, by, pp. 11-13
  68. ↑ Sterritt 1993, pp. 58-60
  69. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 48 left column
  70. ↑ Cahiers du cinéma, January 1985, p. 14; Sterritt 1999, p. 184; Dixon 1997, p. 160
  71. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 51 left column
  72. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 52
  73. ↑ Laura Mulvey: Marie / Eve: Continuity and discontinuity in JL Godard's iconography of women , in: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 47 and 52; Erb 1993, p. 50
  74. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 50 left column
  75. ↑ Erb 1993, pp. 54-55
  76. ↑ Laura Mulvey: Marie / Eve: Continuity and discontinuity in JL Godard's iconography of women , in: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 39-52
  77. ↑ Ellen Drapper: An Alternative to Godard's Metaphysics , in: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 67-68
  78. ↑ Godard in Lire No. 255, May 1997, cited above. in: Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard . Volume 2, 1984-1998, Cahiers du cinéma, 1998, ISBN 2-86642-198-1 , p. 435; De Baecque 2010, p. 623
  79. ↑ Sandra Laugier: The holy family , in: Locke / Warren 1993, pp. 27-38
  80. ↑ The point is in the 42nd film minute (PAL speed).
  81. ↑ Annie Goldmann: “Je vous salue, Marie”, un film plein de grâces . In: CinémAction No. 52 (1989): Le cinéma selon Godard , pp. 75-76.
  82. ↑ Erb 1993, p. 46
  83. ↑ Goldmann 1989, p. 77; Mulvey 1993, pp. 50-51
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on January 28, 2012 in this version .