Sympathy For The Devil (1968)

While their Scouse rivals hired an American director to make a wacky monochrome homage to French New Wave director/icon Jean-Luc Godard in A Hard Day’s Night, the Rolling Stones got the man himself who, by 1968, had renounced all his earlier work, become a revolutionary, started shooting everything in colour, and rejected linear narrative completely.

Sympathy For The Devil consists of beautifully shot footage of the Stones in London’s Olympic Studios writing, rehearsing and recording their most danceable evocation of evil, interspersed with Godard’s surreal skits on the subject of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution and Sean Lynch’s voice reading out stuff about porn and guerilla warfare.

It is neither a documentary nor a linear work of fiction but an ambiguous, annoying and hypnotic discourse on the New Left politics of the time.

The Stones are little more than props. They are not interviewed and have no lines except boring band-at-work stuff like “Can you turn it up in Keef’s cans?”

Yet they are stunning to look at; Mick so thin and beautiful; Keith so cool and elegant; Charlie so deadpan and monkey-faced; Bill . . . well Godard doesn’t bother much with him.

And Godard either knows or senses that Brian Jones is on his way out – of the Rolling Stones and of existence – almost always shooting him from the back.

The scenes with the black militants are disturbing and ambiguous enough to be considered both racist and misogynist (“I’d jump over ten nigger bitches just to get to one white woman”), and Godard’s enthusiasm for the clothes, mannerisms and weapons of the Black Panthers is the ultimate example of the hard-on so many white middle-class 1960s radicals had for angry, sexy black men with guns who didn’t like women.

The film – distributed in some markets as One Plus One – was savaged by the critics and seen by virtually nobody.

The Rolling Stones
Themselves

Director
Jean-Luc Godard