The Stones on Rolling

The recent chat about Shine a Light, the Scorsese monument sent my thoughts to the 1968 crazed pyschedlic collage "Sympathy for the Devil"/"One Plus One". A single song becomes the backbone mantra for staged interviews, executions, revolutionary plots, LSD salvation, Park times, Situationist unravelment, Brian Jones' disintergration, transmedial assemblages, Hippy love outs, Cut ups of consciousness and the gyrational poutings of Mick.

Godard's documentation of late 1960's western counter-culture, examining the Black Panthers, referring to works by LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver. Other notable subjects are the role of the media, the mediated image, A growing technocratic society, Womens Liberation, the May revolt in France and the power of language. Cutting between 3 major scenes, including the Rolling Stones in the studio, the film is visually intercut with Eve Democracy (Wiazemsky) using graffiti which amalgamates organisations, corporations and ideologies. Godard also examines the role of the revolutionary within western culture. Although he believes western culture needs to be destroyed, it can only be done so by the rejection of intellectualisation. "There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual"
'Getting back to zero' represented an idea Godard raised in Le Gai Savoir where Juliet Berto's character says "I want to learn, to teach myself, everyone, to turn back against the enemy that weapon with which it attacks us: Language." Language as a weapon is above all the main subject within Le Gai Savoir and is represented in numerous ways in One Plus One. To Godard, film language and the visual image had lost its educational or instructive purpose, especially in the commercial cinema. One Plus One then represents an attempt to redefine the visual image into an instructive force, which is created from the destruction of film language. If Le Gai Savoir diagnoses the problem of language, the culture that produces it, and its inherent fallibility, One Plus One is the antecedent about its destruction.

"'One Plus One' does not mean 'one plus one equals two'. It just means what it says, 'one plus one'" From The Depiction of Late 1960’s Counter Culture in Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil by Gary Elshaw

And now the old men are gathering again to play their songs and charge admission:

How things have changed....and not.

Upon completion of the film, and unbeknown to Godard, the producers changed Godard's ending of the film to include a completed version of the Rolling Stones song 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Premiering at the London Film Festival in November of 1968 Godard was said to have risen from his seat and stormed from the cinema, but not before striking the producer. The film was marketed as a 'Stones Film' and renamed to include reference to the song. Consequently both audiences and Godard were disappointed. The Depiction of Late 1960’s Counter Culture in Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil by Gary Elshaw