By far the best film he made in 1968, One Plus One shows Godard at a crossroads between pure reality (behind the scenes with the Rolling Stones) and fiction allegedly concerned with reality (long stretches of verbalised Black Power literature).
UK
3*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Anthony B. Richmond
Running time: 110 minutes
Alternate titles: Sympathy for the Devil
One + One
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to film the Rolling Stones but then overlay so much voiceover and spoken readings that it turns the production into an inept love letter to Mao. Godard filmed the band as it developed its hit single “Sympathy for the Devil” at London’s Olympic Studios and collected some magnificent material over time as the song absorbed the band members’ musical input. However, he never interviews them, and we barely ever hear them speak. The focus is on the song, as it should be. The other half of the film is a helter-skelter jumble of the Black Power movement, punny communist graffiti, pornography and Adolf Hitler in scenes that show little regard for the audience’s enjoyment or comprehension.
But then, this is a film (for lack of a better word) made by Godard, who has never shied away from being a terribly shallow intellectual. Entitled One Plus One, this semi-documentary appears to be rooted in the director’s political activism. It is important to note that it was made in the summer of 1968, right after the mass student protests in France. However, any ideas that may be found fluttering around inside it are the words of others: mostly black freedom fighters and thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver.
In theory, the title refers to the two tracks – one reproduction and one very staged production – on which the film advances with starts and stops. The reproduction shows us the (seemingly) unstaged bits of performance by the Rolling Stones, who only ever perform parts of a single song: “Sympathy for the Devil”, which would be released on their 10th studio album, Beggars Banquet, a few months later. The very staged production involves multiple venues where we see people reading aloud from books (sometimes Black Power literature, sometimes proto-Nazi literature) or spraying graffiti in Godard’s dreadfully annoying pun-ridden style: FREUDEMOCRACY; SOVIETCONG; CINEMARXISM. On occasion, these tired puns also spill over into the title cards (e.g. SoCIAty).
The reproduction may just be small doses of the band rehearsing the same song over and over, but the long takes and proximity to the band members bring the viewer back to life after every dull stretch of ideological recitation. And although we often see the boom microphone at the edge of the frame, the song is never stripped of its magic. Perhaps it is because the music is pure bliss and the 25-year-old Mick Jagger is such a delight: Relaxed, often seen smoking a cigarette after the song has started already and before he starts singing, he is the epitome of cool.
The fragments of the production, by contrast, are far from entertaining. However, thanks to the colourful locations along the Thames in Central London, they are much more interesting than Godard’s comparable but positively unwatchable Joy of Learning (Le gai savoir), produced earlier the same year. The four parts of the production are: random scenes of people spraying graffiti; Black Power supporters reading pages of ideological propaganda out loud in or next to burnt-out cars on the Thames riverbank; a man wearing a purple costume reading from Mein Kampf in an adult bookshop; and a taciturn woman named Eve Democracy (played by Anne Wiazemsky) walking around a lush forest answering a journalist’s increasingly complex questions with only a “yes” or a “no”.
Eve is a serene but comically shallow figure who is never heard from again until the final metatextual scene, in which she becomes a sacrificial lamb of sorts. Her scene in the forest (labelled, in quintessentially Godardian fashion, “ALL ABOUT EVE“) is presented in an unbroken take just over 9 minutes long, and while it conveys little of substance, Wiazemsky, wearing a faded lemon-coloured peasant dress, holds our attention throughout because of the fuss around her. A man with a handheld television camera films her, another man holds the microphone, one asks a stream of questions, and a fourth is the clapper loader.
But no matter how urgent or how well developed an ideology is, it is worthless in a film if it is not firmly absorbed by the characters, the narrative and/or the landscape of the diegesis. At the pornographic bookstore, two white Maoists sit bloodied against a wall and are slapped across the face by children who visit the shop with their parents (!). In response, they yell out slogans like “Long live Mao!” or “Victory to the NLF!”. The NLF had secured Algerian independence six years earlier. Besides the Black Power literature, we are also bombarded with a disembodied but ever-so-serious voice’s narrativised descriptions of sex acts involving Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.
To some extent, the mish-mash of approaches – observations alternating with very clearly staged pieces of cinematic theatre – reflects the unstable point in his career at which Godard made One Plus One. Having shot it just a few short months after the landmark events of the 1968 student uprisings, Godard was in the midst of an artistic revolution. His recent films (Masculin féminin, La chinoise, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Joy of Learning) had been explicitly political, and Godard, emulating many a young Paris intellectual at the time, had been seduced by Maoism. He was about to embark on a handful of projects with Jean-Pierre Gorin that would completely bulldoze the foundations of storytelling (and, in all honesty, of entertainment), but when he made One Plus One, he still straddled two worlds: his past and future approaches to film.
Despite 1967’s Weekend proclaiming itself the end of cinema, despite the vapid nonsense that was A Film Like Any Other and despite the scenes with the Rolling Stones containing no story at all, the film almost succeeds in spite of itself. We keep watching because we keep anticipating the next scene, when the film will return to the comfortable confines of the recording studio. The snippets of rehearsal we are privy to contain people who are not shot from the neck down, as Godard was apt to do in his more austere films around this time. No, we get tracking shots and pans and a crane shot or two. It is almost as if the music and the opportunity inspired the director to use the toys at his disposal rather than throw them out of his pram.
It is a shame that Godard is so incurious, though, as he completely misses the behind-the-scenes drama with the band. Brian Jones, who had been a founding member of the band, appears in the opening scene but then is barely heard from again and inexplicably disappears before the final credits. In reality, the rift between him and the other members of the band would lead to him leaving the band by the end of the year. By the following summer, he would be dead. But this is only clear in retrospect and basically absent from the film, despite Godard’s privileged first-person access.
But then, Godard was never much of a director, and it would be unfair to expect him to know the answer to the filmic equivalent of 1 + 1.