Sympathy for the Devil

While the Rolling Stones rehearse "Sympathy for the Devil," Black Panthers recite Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" with bloody threats against white women. Anne Wiazemsky, Godard's second wife, is interrogated, forced to answer only "yes" or "no." A voiceover reads excerpts from a garish detective novel using the aliases of world leaders. Bookstore clerks beat a hostage while one reads "Mein Kampf" and the victim shouts, "Long Live Mao!" Ten sequence scenes, filmed almost entirely in long takes. Disconnected, juxtaposed, a cinematic "one plus one." If there's a common thread, it's a specific moment in time...

Thank you, Douban, for making me realize that my finding this film boring, obscure, and sleep-inducing isn't just me. Why did the Rolling Stones agree to let Godard make such a stream-of-consciousness biographical film back then? The powerful drumbeats and moving songs are completely reduced to background music for Godard's collage of political declarations. The scenes of brilliance and inspiration in the recording studio become incredibly dull because they are too detached. The incomprehensible political texts mechanically recited leave only waves of fatigue, like "I know what he's talking about, but I don't know what he's really talking about." Maybe this is how people who don't care about politics feel when they see anti-China individuals sarcastically ranting. The moment the end credits appeared...

Godard's original cut of "One Plus One" ran for 110 minutes, but the producers, displeased with it, took it upon themselves to re-edit it into this version, which they titled "Sympathy for the Devil," much to Godard's fury.

Godard is truly the pioneer of anti-immersion in cinematic history. As the end credits rolled, a fellow moviegoer (or maybe a Rolling Stones fan?) clapped and cheered with the enthusiasm of someone at the end of a concert. However, given that the final scene wasn't the Rolling Stones playing music but rather Godard expounding his political ideologies (and in a somewhat subdued mood), the atmosphere in the theater instantly froze. And wasn't I feeling the same way? Initially, I was blown away by Godard's sinuous, panoramic long takes, feeling like I'd ingested cinematic opium. But then, in the second half, Godard repeated that exact same technique over and over. Is this supposed to prove that filming one awesome shot makes you a god of cinema, but filming it more than once just makes you an idiot? Maybe...

At the Grand Theater. This is an experimental work from Godard's "great man" period, and it's hard to evaluate it without considering the critical context of the year 1968. If you treat it as political pop art, its energy transcends irony and surges like a storm. For Godard, music, politics, and pop culture are all interchangeable symbol factories. The film feels like a real desert of symbols: the Black Panther's abandoned theater, Anne Wiazemsky's answers in the woods, and the overlapping of the Rolling Stones' rehearsal with the soundtrack taken from a pornographic magazine, all suggest the emptiness of language. If you consider the entire film as a cocktail made from different ingredients, the scene from the underground bookstore is like a Sichuan peppercorn. Its spiciness doesn't come from the close-up parade of pornographic magazine covers, or the quasi- Fahrenheit...