Sympathy for the Devil has a bad reputation. Like most of the work produced during Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “revolution” period in the late-60s and 70s, it rarely screens without a disclaimer advertising its difficulty. The synopsis selling last month’s screening of the film at New York’s Film Forum (as part of a month long tribute to Godard’s work of the 1960s) was just 55 words long, but it managed to contain three red flag inferences of Sympathy’s “difficulty” (italics all mine): the “camera endlessly prowls,” it’s “shot in long, long takes,” it’s “deadening and hypnotic.” A Reverse Shot blog entry led off with the poster quote: “One helluva cocktease.”
One million critics with a common case of blue balls can’t be entirely wrong, but writing off the film formerly known as One Plus One as a novelty from a filmmaker determined to be difficult (not to mention attempting to sell it by scaring the audience away) is a lot easier than actual engagement. Certainly, Sympathy is a provocation––political, formal, pop cultural––before it’s a coherent work of narrative drama; certainly, most of its most memorable moments involve juxtaposition of political critique with infantile sex farce. But the same could be said for the average YouTube video, and the kids seem to be able to eat those up without a warning label. If it comes off as impenetrable, it may just be because no penetration is needed––everything Godard wants to say is laid into the film’s surface. If anything, Sympathy for the Devil is a blatant (and, at times, blatantly transparent) cinematic flail from a filmmaker at a crisis point.
As Richard Brody tells it in his recently-released Godard bio Everything is Cinema, Sympathy was an historical accident, Godard’s third scrape of the barrel in an attempt to make good on a contract with an English production company. After a “pro-abortion” polemic fell through when that city overturned the relevant law, Godard turned to the British music scene instead of its never-to-be-born youth, only settling on the Stones when the Beatles weren’t available (or, rather, when John Lennon declined to star In Godard’s proposed Trotsky biopic, and subsequently decided that the Beatles’ recording sessions were not to be filmed).
Godard arrived in London to begin shooting Sympathy on May 30, 1968, after a fairly busy month. Though he initially planned to shoot in May, the production was pushed back whilst Godard inserted himself in the protests over the ouster of Henri Langois from the Paris Cinematheque, played a key role in the forced shitting down of that year’s Cannes film festival, and made a film about the student uprising in Paris with Philippe Garrel, which was stolen by a stranger immediately after it was finished. By the end of all that, the filmmaker (who, like the band, had first hand experience in making a living off of counterculture celebrity prior to the events of May––had been making up to $30,000 a month on the U.S. college circuit) no longer felt moved to document the Stones’ slice of the culture, but his British producers had every intention of holding him to his contract. The first four-day shoot began on June 1; Godard returned to London in August to shoot more, after having cranked out another film about the goings-on in Paris, A Film Like Any Other, in the interim.
Feeling fundamentally changed by the events of the spring, Godard denounced old friends like Francois Truffaut and announced that he’d from then on he’d reinvent the way he made and thought about films. “Culture is an alibi of imperialism,” he told the Sunday Times at the time. “So we have to destroy culture.” Never a fan of Godard’s work or the French New Wave project at large, and eventually insistent that his hand-selected rival was nothing but a Situationist poser, this was the kind of Godardian statement that Guy Debord couldn’t ignore. In the 12th edition of the Situationist Internationale, published the following summer, Debord rolled his eyes thusly: “Godard, following the latest fashions as always, is adopting a destructive style just a blatantly plagiarized and pointless as all the rest of his work.” Where Godard insisted in its wake that May 68 had reenergized him and had made him more determined than ever to break ranks with the bourgeoisie, a year later Debord begged to differ. “Godard was in fact immediately outmoded [italics his] by the May 1968 revolt, which caused him to be recognized as a spectacular manufacturer of a superficial, pseudocritical, cooptive art rummaged out of the trashcans of the past.”
I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of digging up the relevant Debord quote if I didn’t think he had a point, but I do think his argument assumes that Godard had more control over his ability to express himself through craft in June of 1968 than I think physical evidence really suggests. The actual substance of Sympathy feels less violently destructive or precisely argumentative than unsure, immature. In the same Sunday Times interview, Godard said he wanted it to be “almost like an amateur” film; for better or worse, he succeeded.
Structurally, the film is almost comically simple. Long shots of the Rolling Stones in the recording studio, tracked and pinned by Godard’s camera as they work through the arrangement of the song that gave the film its ultimate title, weave in and out of various staged tableau in which iconic images of the day’s political pop are propped up against its precepts, both word and image coming in for simultaneous reverence and rape. Why are the takes so long? Godard refused to do more than an assembly edit. The statement, from that interview with the Times, in which he boasts of his desired anti-professionalism: “I’m trying to make it as simple as possible, almost like an amateur film. The length of the takes are decided by Kodak––I’ve four or five choices of lengths of film available from them and I’m quite happy with that.”
Is this punkish defiance, or is it laziness? Of course, the latter and a certain form of the former can travel in the same bundle, but this feels almost more like deliberate self-sabotage. Godard’s chosen title for the film was One Plus One, a reduction of his method of collage to the simplest possible equation. Aggressive indifference and obsession with process may simply be tactics towards the lowering of expectations. But the more notable artifact of Godard’s stated attempt to regress is evident in the film’s sense of humor. At virtually every turn, actual political critique is either subverted by or subsumed within a dick joke.
Early on he introduces us to a band of black militants, who hang out in a dockyard full of broken down Fords and drive-in movie screens, a wasteland where the scraps of American culture are, as a upper-crust-English accented voiceover informs us, are a virus, like “spores spread to the west winds.” Soon this voiceover seems to consist of the wholesale reading of work of historically revisionist erotic fiction; if Debord had any airtight evidence that Godard’s “invention” was nothing but cut-rate Situationsim, it’s the literary softcore featuring Brezhnev and The Pope heard here. The militants themselves toss each other rifles whilst chanting Black Panther texts. At first we assume the guns are for use against The Man, but they turn out to be aids for the ritualized rape and murder of blonde white women. The most facile segment involves a reading of Mein Kampf in a titty mag boutique––it’s all just stuff to masturbate to, get it?
And of course, the Stones themselves, just trying to make a little bit of rock n’ roll in the middle of this polemical hell, are the biggest dick joke of all. They’re the English rockstars known for their catchy tunes about one night stands, perfecting their anthem about the devil’s right place, right time role in political history. And for all his reluctance to actually give the Stones fan what it’s assumed that he wants, Godard must have gotten a kick out of Jagger’s lyrical finger-pointing: “Who killed the Kennedys? After all it was you and me.” Could there be a better symmetry for a film about the linking of political tragedy to desire? Sympathy for the Devil might have been too literal/commercial for Godard’s taste, but it’s the better, more evocative title in the end.
The film’s highpoint, the section where Godard seems most on top of his powers, the zenith of Sympathy’s positing of crumbling revolution with sex farce, is the scene embedded above, known as the Eve Democracy sequence. Godard’s then-wife, Anna Wiazemsky, is hounded through a forest by a camera crew. The crew lob at Wiazemesky a series of increasingly obtuse questions and statements, to which Wiazemsky invariably responds with a simple yes or no. “Orgasm is the only moment where you can’t cheat life?” asks the interviewer. Wiazemsky appears to think about that for a moment, and then responds with a nod of her head, “Yes.” Her contemplation wasn’t merely acting, it was total illusion––the questions were being asked in English, which Wiazemsky didn’t speak, and Godard was off camera, giving her hand signals to suggest when she should say yes or no. According to Brody, it was not just a scene but a personal stunt, the director’s attempt at getting back at the obstinately uninterested in revolution Wiazemsky for refusing to appear in A Film Like the Others because she “did not share the ideology.”
That Wiazemesky didn’t understand what she was saying no to is maybe the most powerful concrete idea contained in the entire film. It’s a parallel to the fair weather revolutionaries with whom Godard was, at that point, so frustrated. It also seems like an aggression against his own political impotence. At Cannes, he had made a speech including himself in the lament for the lack of “a single film showing the problems of the workers or students today.” His first attempt to rectify that lack, the film made with Garrel, was lost; his own lover refused to support him in its second attempt. The most compelling bit of his third attempt amounts to a public sex game with his newish wife, and that he’s able to con her into going along with it stands as his thinly veiled demonstration of male dominance. For all the talk of Godard’s talk of breaking from his cinematic concerns of the past, this is a direct extension of the real life/cinematic life game playing that marked his films with Anna Karina. Let it not be said that Godard completely abandoned his romantic project.
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