I Was Told Never to Watch This Movie. I Did Anyway. What Happened Next Shocked Me.

Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One, dir. Godard

i. For a long time, on the political theory right, Foucault and especially Discipline and Punish was a continually-invoked boogeyman. A sort of symbol of everything that had gone wrong with postmodernism, theory, "the Left", 1968, France, etc etc--if you heard one of these invocations, you no doubt heard it dozens or hundreds of times. I was eventually present for one extra-unhinged rant about Foucault from An Academic So Famous You've Heard Of Him and decided to see for myself. Imagine my extreme disappointment to discover Foucault is really just a standard-issue intellectual historian.

ii. When Godard died, I started working through his movies. Of the early ones you can say with real fairness that he was uniquely able to conjure up female interiority and dedicated to trying to understand women--he just really, really hated them. But the early movies are all good and interesting; by the late 60s he moved into a more abstract form of film that was sort of like montage or bricolage, just a bunch of pieces, motifs, ideas, not really meant to resolve in the space of the film, but in your head afterwards. I do not like these, for the most part, and they are somewhat intentionally hard to love.

iii. One Plus One has a terrible reputation among Rolling Stones fans and Godard fans, and for this reason I avoided it for a long time. But it turns out that it is, more or less, a standard-issue late 60s Godard film with extensive footage of the Rolling Stones putting together "Sympathy for the Devil" in the studio. It's not a great movie, but it is a perfectly adequate one.

iv. The striking thing about the Stones footage is that they have the basic elements of the song and no real idea about how to make it work, and they're experimenting in the studio (expensive) and being continuously observed. Brian Jones is near the end of his life and not in a position to contribute, so it's really down to just four of them. And they are consummately professional at all points: when Mick or Keith has a clear idea, they communicate it; when they have no idea what to do, they methodically move through different approaches until they find the one that works. It's not meant to be a warts-and-all documentary, so the comparison is somewhat unfair, but the one thing the footage notably is not is Let It Be; no one's getting snippy at each other, everyone approaches it like a job where the other people are also professionals. 

Gimme Shelter is, by a lot, the best movie any of the 60s British bands made, but it also has that same glow of professionalism: hedonistic excess, to be sure, but when it comes down to music, it's work, and they take it seriously. 

v. I do wonder if the timing of it all matters: in 1968 the Stones had just done "Jumping Jack Flash", Keith had discovered open tunings, and they were right at the beginning of one of the very best creative runs any band has ever had.