"Licensing the invisible is exhausting." Like the films of the 80s and Mozart Forever, Alas to Me begins as a buffoonery in which the plastic and behavior of the characters are deconstructed and presented deliberately conditionally, absurdly, however, later this picture mutates into tragedy, becoming one of those knots in which the worldview, aesthetics and conceptual aspirations of Godard of the 90s are tied. “Alas for me” is as important to Godard’s understanding of the 90s as “Praise be to you.” Mary to explain Godard in the '80s. It is especially important that both films are about religion.
“Alas for me” begins with the phrase that “we have forgotten the words of prayer”, that is, Godard immediately speaks of forgetting the special understanding of communion with God, which is prayer. At the same time, Godard, like Heidegger, is trying to break through to that original philosophical and religious tradition that has been mutilated by Western metaphysics. Nonlinearly telling the story of the love of God and the earthly woman, the husband who became the third superfluous, Godard dotted, implicitly, but in full force only in the final contrasts God with Western metaphysics, the abstract Absolute, perceiving everything as the object of his desires and the apophatic understanding of God as the Invisible and Incomprehensible Mystery.
Here Godard approaches the Greek philosopher and theologian H. Jannaras, who asserted that Nietzsche’s nihilism, his phrase about the death of God, is said about the decline of the Western rationalistic-metaphysical understanding of God, and Heidegger’s Genesis, defined negatively in relation to existence, is close to the apophatic theological tradition. The God who dwells in Simon and terrorizes his wife is not a true God, but an idol, the speculative-scholastic doctrines of the rationalists and Thomists, legitimizing subject-object relations, and hence the subject’s violence against the object.
The true God cannot be expressed and expressed in the language of rationalistic speculation, what Bacon called the “spider method” (remember, in Bergman’s painting “Through the Dim Glass”, the heroine in hysterics says that God turned out to be a spider, it is a stone directly into the scholastic Absolute of Western metaphysics), It can be understood only mystically, in direct prayerful communion. The film is called “Alas to me”, because it is very difficult for a person to correctly understand God, and with this title Godard proclaims his spiritual poverty, the inability to enter into dialogue with Him, because “we have forgotten the words of prayer.”
However, poetry and the language of metaphors liberated from the power of reason come again to Godard and his constant viewer to help express the invisible and ineffable in glimpses of truth, in the lumens of being. “Stand in the lumen of being,” as Heidegger said. After all, language is the home of being, its habitat, but a language of poetic, spontaneous, irrational, not subject to rational schemes. The true language of prayer. Alas for me, it is a complexly constructed but not constructed film, it is not a dead artifact with a linear composition, a standard narrative and a three-part dramaturgy, it is an intuitive philosophizing with the help of images and sounds, an attempt to enter into a dialogue with the Supreme Spiritual Reality, undertaking a large-scale destruction of all those schemes and doctrines that interfere with this dialogue.