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June 1968 found Godard in London, attempting to ‘match musical discourse with political discourse’ and tell parallel stories of creation and destruction for his film One Plus One. In practice this means that his film features some prime footage of the Rolling Stones at their peak – Jagger, Richards, Wyman, Jones and Watts – turning the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ from a rough outline into a fully-formed work in the studio, intercut with an assault of primary colours and sloganeering, as black power activists stage agit-prop theatre in a junkyard (one man reads about the blues from a wheelbarrow, two white women are shot while a man talks of ‘love, patience, brotherhood and community’) and Anne Wiazemsky sprays topical slogans (CINEMARXISM, SOVIETCONG) over the walls, billboards and cars of London. There’s also plenty of gnomic sloganeering that should be taken too seriously at your peril: ‘The only way to be an intellectual revolutionary is to give up being an intellectual’; ‘A man of culture is as far from an artist as a historian is from a man of action’; ‘When sex becomes problematic, in walks a totalitarian’. Discuss.

The dvd includes both cuts of the film. There’s producer Iain Quarrier’s cut, entitled Sympathy for the Devil to cash in on the Stones’ popularity, and which has a completed version of their song playing out at the end (over footage of them playing something different). This is the cut that caused Godard to walk out its NFT showing, hitting the producer for good measure on the way and telling the audience to collect their admission money and give it to the Eldridge Cleaver Foundation before calling them all fascists. Quarrier, ironically enough, plays the purple-clad, Mein Kampf-declaiming owner of the sex, comics and pulp fiction bookshop in the film. Godard’s cut, One Plus One, has an unresolved ending, in which the Stones simply continue to jam and chat. As Godard said, 1+1 shouldn’t be taken to add up to 2, it’s just a statement of a situation. It’s not meant to be ‘a nice piece of art’ he said, ‘it’s just enough to know where it’s coming from and going to’. Nearly four decades on, this is a fascinating historical artefact twice over – a musical one and a political one.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 26th April 2006
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