In the last scene of Sympathy for the Devil, a deranged, Buster Keaton-like individual in white trainers, black trousers, a grey raincoat, a large white hat and sunglasses is running about on a beach, directing a film. He rushes a black man and a white woman, both carrying guns, to a camera dolly. Apparently exhausted, the woman collapses, and the director splashes red paint on her white dress. She is then placed on the dolly. It rises into the air; the black man raises his gun in triumph. The camera, between two flags, one black and one red, is swung across the sky as the Rolling Stones sing: “Pleased to meet you — hope you guess my name. But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.”
The mad hatter is Jean-Luc Godard. The year is 1968. In Paris, students are fomenting a new French revolution. In America, the 1967 summer of love has turned into a season of bloody resistance to the Vietnam war. Preachers of black power — Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver — are calling for the violent overthrow of the white establishment. In London, Godard himself has stormed out of a screening at the National Film Theatre, crying “ You’re all fascists” and demanding that the box-office money be given to Cleaver. Later, across town, the Stones will be in a studio, putting together one of their greatest tracks, Sympathy for the Devil, observed by Godard’s camera, deadpan and cold as ice.
As Lou Reed was to sing in 1970, looking back on that strange, fevered world: “Y’know, those were different times.” The late-1960s season of revolt was brief but intense. If you were there — as I was — you were destined never to forget the electricity in the air, the overpowering sense that the world was either about to end or about to be transformed into something utterly different. Even political sceptics such as me — “a quietist”, my radicalised friends snarled — were infected by the fever for change. And even we, the hippie quietists, solemnly and loyally turned up to see the latest Godard film the moment it came out.
From A Bout de Souffle, through Une Femme est une femme, Bande à part, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou and Deux ou trois Choses que je sais d’elle, he seemed to be remaking cinema according to some higher and frequently incomprehensible logic. Like his colleagues in French new-wave cinema — Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette — he began from the American cinema of Ford, Hitchcock and Ray and from the French tradition of Vigo and Renoir. But unlike those others, Godard became increasingly unconcerned with movie tricks and games. In the sci-fi movie Alphaville, for example, he doesn’t even bother to pretend that the supposedly futuristic city in which the secret agent Lemmy Caution pursues his quarry is anything other than contemporary Paris.
He was progressively stripping away all artifice, in an increasingly crazed attempt to get at cinematic truth. He had a deep faith in cinema but also a furious impatience with what it had become. By 1967, little of the conventional movie was left in Godard’s work. La Chinoise and Week End were films in which political urgency had swamped all aesthetic considerations. The issue was the revolution: when, where and how? La Chinoise is an interminable debate about Marxism and Mao in a student commune. Week End, which involves the ultimate traffic jam, is about the final failure of bourgeois, capitalist society. Thought has replaced action as the focus of these movies. The characters do not act or move forward through a plot; rather, they are forced simply to contemplate and discuss their predicament. That predicament may be fictional, but, at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be. We are “alienated” from the fiction by Godard’s constant insistence — derived from Bertolt Brecht — on reminding us that this is only a film. Out there is the real world.
And then, in 1968, came Sympathy for the Devil. The story seems to be that Godard came to London to make a pro-abortion movie, but that was abandoned after a change in the legislation. He then said he wanted to make a film with either the Beatles or the Stones; the former said no, the latter yes.
Godard was later to re-edit the movie slightly and release it as One Plus One. He had been angered by the producer’s attempts to commercialise the film by running the whole of the Stones’ performance of the song. The later title makes clearer his intention — to put together two discrete elements, rock and revolution, and see what happened — but the first gives more credit to the power of the Stones’ song.
I saw it in 1968, and I hadn’t seen it since. I remember being alternately bored, mesmerised and, at the brilliant climax, moved in a way that I found hard to define. But what was really extraordinary about seeing it again was that I seemed to remember every shot and every line. As if I had seen it yesterday, I could remember Mick Jagger looking behind the camera and drawling “Ca va?”, presumably to Godard; the endless shot of the back of Brian Jones’s head; the interview in the woods with Eve Democracy, and her desultory answers; the black-power commune, with its eerily passive white female victims; the graffiti artists spraying “Cinemarxism” and other words and punning slogans on walls in London; and, of course, that crazed, Keaton-esque final sequence. Clearly, whatever Godard was doing with his cameras, it stuck.
But what was he doing? The film is a collage of elements that do not directly interact. Dominant among them is, of course, the Stones working on their song until it emerges in its final, majestic form. If it does nothing else, the film reminds us of the immense and, for the Stones, decisive talent of Keith Richards. Almost equally dominant, however, is the man on the soundtrack reading an intense, Chandler-esque political thriller. His voice is urgent, and the characters in the disjointed tale include the main political figures of the time, notably Mao and Che Guevara.
Then there is the interview with the vacant, wandering figure of Eve Democracy, conducted by a pushy young director, whose camera and crew are all watched by Godard’s slowly tracking camera. There is the graffiti artist, and there is the black commune, in which political tracts are declaimed while strange, violent and seemingly meaningless rituals are pursued in a wrecked car yard by the Thames. There are even bizarre scenes in a porn shop, in which people pay for their purchases with fascist declamations and salutes and by slapping the faces of two Maoist students. And so on.
What first strikes one about all this is an expressive flatness. Godard’s cameras simply look at things, and his tracking and panning, as well as his cuts — made, it seems, reluctantly, as though he’d rather not intervene in time’s flow at all — are not even remotely intended to dramatise. Indeed, the shootings in the black commune take place off camera. The filming of the Stones, meanwhile, seems to be almost autistic, as if the camera is simultaneously baffled by and utterly unconcerned about what is going on.
Plainly, Godard is determined not to dramatise the connections in this collage. Indeed, there may be no connections.
But, of course, the central connection is obvious. All the elements of the film are about revolution, about throwing off the shackles of oppression. We are being led deep into the dialectic, the historical process of thrust and counterthrust that leads finally to the revolution. The film realises that process literally through the clash of ideas, but also stylistically. The Chandler-esque thriller contrasts the language of America with the thought processes of Mao. The interviews with Eve Democracy and by the black radio reporter in the commune contrast the workings of the media with the urgency of action on the street. During the making of the film, the producers were concerned that Godard seemed more interested in the students on the Paris streets than the movie. But, in fact, they shouldn’t have worried: that very sense that reality is much, much more important than art is one of the main tensions apparent in the finished film.
But what is the connection between the Stones and the rest of the collage? In a sense, there is no answer to that. Godard asks us just to look and think. The fact that this dandyish, radical song, with its view of history as a violent, satanic plot, was what they happened to be recording seems a self-evident link to the uprisings of 1968 — that’s all that needs to be said. But is this comfortable dandyism being criticised by its proximity to violent reality? Or is it a celebration of that reality? Up to you.
There is a good deal more to be said about the part that rock’n’roll played in that extraordinary, electric year. Godard’s politics, for all his intelligence, were disgusting. The Mao he took so seriously was, in fact, a psychotic killer, whose malignant narcissism led directly to the death of 70m Chinese people. If Godard is ashamed of his views — as he should be — then I am not aware that he has said so.
Tom Stoppard’s politics are, however, very fine, very subtle and very humane. Coincidentally, his new play, Rock’n’Roll, is, exactly like Sympathy for the Devil, a collage in which rock music and reality are placed side by side. The play begins in 1968 and moves forward to 1990 and contrasts the real-world politics of the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring and its aftermath with the political theories and games going on in London and Cambridge.
It is an excellent play, one of Stoppard’s very best. And, unlike Godard’s ambivalent cameras, it is in love with the music. For Stoppard, rock’n’roll seems to provide the necessary release, a pagan affirmation of the physical unity of body and soul. It is about the deeply good times when the dialectic falls away to be replaced by our absolute assimilation into our moment in time, a moment when, at last, we can stop caring and suffering.
Stoppard’s play is an answer to Godard’s film. But it does not supersede it. You cannot have an answer if there is not first a question. And that is, ultimately, what Godard’s extraordinary film is: a question. A supreme summary of the radical politics of the time, it asks what we want of the world and what we must do to get it and, apparently, provides a chilling, violent answer.
But, to be honest, in that final, lovely, absurdly romantic mad-hatter sequence, there is one answer that Godard did not intend — what we really want is beauty in cinema. About politics, Godard is always wrong; but he does love the movies to distraction, and that — as his dolly, with its fluttering flags, rises into the sky — redeems him.
A free DVD of Sympathy for the Devil is included with today’s Sunday Times
