ABSTRACT
Commentators wishing to convert the overwhelmingly secular majority of contemporary films to religion, or to discover a religious subtext within them, often declare any secularism merely apparent. Ever since Romanticism, in the West Woman has been the 'natural' Other: nurturing like the Nature with whose image she is fused and of which she is the synecdoche. Removed from the male world of work, she rapidly enters the realm of natural supernaturalism. For Godard, a dialectic links woman's interiority to the unrepresentable darkness of outer space: the blackness of the open mouth at the film's end indicates a fusion of inner body space with the blackness of the universe. The Power of Evil is perilously liable to categorization as a woman's picture with theological red herrings. The Riflewoman fragments the Freikorps psyche by the contradiction between a femininity stereotypically associated with passivity and an actual woman's combativeness.
