One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) | |
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Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Produced by | Eleni Collard Michael Pearson Iain Quarrier |
Starring | Mick Jagger Keith Richards Brian Jones Bill Wyman Charlie Watts Nicky Hopkins Anne Wiazemsky |
Cinematography | Anthony B. Richmond |
Edited by | Ken Rowles |
Music by | The Rolling Stones |
Production company | Cupid Productions |
Distributed by | Connoisseur |
Release date |
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Running time | 110 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £180,000 [1] |
Sympathy for the Devil (originally titled 1 + 1; also One Plus One, by the film director, and distributed under that title in Europe) is a 1968 avant-garde film shot mostly in color by director Jean-Luc Godard, his first British-made, English-language film. [2] It is a composite film, juxtaposing documentary, fictional scenes and dramatised political readings. [3] It is most notable for its scenes documenting the creative evolution of the song "Sympathy for the Devil" as the Rolling Stones developed it during recording sessions at Olympic Studios in London. [4] [5]
Composing the film's main narrative thread are several long, uninterrupted shots of the Rolling Stones in London's Olympic Studios, recording and re-recording various parts to "Sympathy for the Devil". The dissolution of Stone Brian Jones is vividly portrayed, and the chaos of 1968 is made clear when a line referring to the killing of John F. Kennedy is heard changed to the plural after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June.
Interwoven through the movie are outdoor shots of Black Panthers loitering in a junkyard littered with rusting cars heaped upon each other. They read from revolutionary texts (including Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver) and toss their rifles to each other, from man to man. A group of white women, apparently kidnapped and dressed in white, are brutalized and ultimately shot, off-camera; their bloody bodies are subsequently seen in various tableaus throughout the film.
The rest of the film contains a political message in the form of a voiceover about Marxism, the need for revolution and other topics in which Godard was interested. One scene involves a camera crew following a woman about in a yellow peasant dress (played by Anne Wiazemsky), in an outdoor wildlife setting; questions are asked of her, to which she always answers either "yes" or "no". As can be seen from the chapter heading to the scene, she is supposed to be a personification of democracy, a woman named 'Eve Democracy'.
At least one quarter of the film is devoted to indoor shots of a pornographic bookstore that sells such diverse items as Marvel's Doctor Strange , DC's The Atom and The Flash comic books, Nazi pamphlets for propaganda, and various men's magazines. Alternating with the shots of comic books, pinup magazines, and Nazi pamphlets, customers casually enter the bookstore, approach a bookshelf, pick up books or magazines, exchange them for a sheet of paper, and then slap the faces of two Maoist hostages sitting patiently next to a book display. Toward the end of the scene, a small child is admitted for the purpose of buying a pamphlet and slapping the faces of the hostages. After exchanging their purchases and receiving their document, each customer raises his or her right arm in a Nazi salute, and leaves the store. The bookstore owner reads aloud from Mein Kampf .
Mimicking the earlier scene of the camera crew following Eve Democracy is the last scene to the movie where the camera crew lingers on the beach and from afar one man asks another "What are they doing over there?", to which the other answers "I think they're shooting a movie". A large camera crane is positioned on the beach and another woman in white is laid down upon the end of the crane and elevated, along with a motion picture camera, on the platform until she is well above the beach. She does not rise up but remains motionless, half-hanging off the crane, one leg dangling.
In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard moved to London, intending to make a film about abortion. When he discovered that, due to the 1967 Abortion Act, it was no longer a hot topic, he told his producers he would still make a film in London, but on the condition that he would work with either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The Beatles turned him down, but the Rolling Stones were happy to collaborate. As a result, he was able to capture their work in progress as they rehearsed and recorded material for their seventh album, Beggars Banquet . [3]
The film was shot at the Olympic Recording Studios in London and at Camber Sands. In the original version running 104 minutes, Godard left the creation of the song unfinished. [6]
1 + 1 was shown at the 1968 London Film Festival; Godard punched producer Iain Quarrier in the face for the changes made to the film's ending, including featuring the complete version of the song. [7] [8] Godard showed his original version under a London bridge for free after the screening. [8]
New Line Cinema acquired North America distribution rights and the film was shown as Sympathy for the Devil around college campuses during 1969 and 1970, including at University of California, Berkeley; University of Chicago and Hunter College in New York. [6] [8] An hour-long documentary about the making of the film was shown a week prior to the film being shown at the colleges. [8]
In 1970, the Murray Hill Cinema in New York showed Godard's version of 1 + 1 on alternating days with Quarrier's version of Sympathy for the Devil. Roger Greenspun, reviewing both films in The New York Times , wrote: "Why anyone, given the choice, would prefer a producer's version of a movie to a director's escapes me. The movie to see at the Murray Hill is 1 + 1". [4]
In filmmaking and video production, a crane shot is a shot taken by a camera on a moving crane or jib. Filmmaker D. W. Griffith created the first crane for his 1916 epic film Intolerance, with famed special effects pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya later constructing the first iron camera crane which is still adapted worldwide today. Most cranes accommodate both the camera and an operator, but some can be moved by remote control. Crane shots are often found in what are supposed to be emotional or suspenseful scenes. One example of this technique is the shots taken by remote cranes in the car-chase sequence of the 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A. Some filmmakers place the camera on a boom arm simply to make it easier to move around between ordinary set-ups.
Jean-Luc Godard was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014).
A jump cut is a cut in film editing that breaks a single continuous sequential shot of a subject into two parts, with a piece of footage removed to create the effect of jumping forward in time. Camera positioning on the subject across the sequence should vary only slightly to achieve the effect. The technique manipulates temporal space using the duration of a single shot—fracturing the duration to move the audience ahead. This kind of cut abruptly communicates the passing of time, as opposed to the more seamless dissolve heavily used in films predating Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which extensively used jump cuts and popularized the technique in the 1960s. For this reason, jump cuts are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing, but are sometimes nonetheless used for creative purposes. Jump cuts tend to draw attention to the constructed nature of the film. More than one jump cut is sometimes used in a single sequence.
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Anita Pallenberg was an Italian-German film actress, artist, and model. A style icon and "It Girl" of the 1960s and 1970s, Pallenberg was credited as the muse of the Rolling Stones: she was the romantic partner of the Rolling Stones founder, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, and later, from 1967 to 1980, the partner of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children.
"Sympathy for the Devil" is a song by English rock band the Rolling Stones. The song was written by Mick Jagger and credited to the Jagger–Richards partnership. It is the opening track on the band's 1968 album Beggars Banquet. The song has received critical acclaim and features on Rolling Stone magazine's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, being ranked number 106 in the 2021 edition.
Beggars Banquet is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones, released on 6 December 1968 by Decca Records in the United Kingdom and by London Records in the United States. It was the first Rolling Stones album produced by Jimmy Miller, whose production work formed a key aspect of the group's sound throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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"Sympathy for the Devil" is a song by the Rolling Stones.
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Raoul Coutard was a French cinematographer. He is best known for his connection with the French New Wave period and particularly for his work with director Jean-Luc Godard, which includes Breathless (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend (1967). Coutard also shot films for New Wave director François Truffaut—including Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962)—as well as Jacques Demy, a contemporary frequently associated with the movement.
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