Sympathy for the Devil (film)
| Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) |
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1969 premiere poster
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| Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Produced by |
Eleni Collard Michael Pearson, 4th Viscount Cowdray Iain Quarrier |
| Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Starring |
Mick Jagger Brian Jones Keith Richards Bill Wyman Charlie Watts Nicky Hopkins |
| Cinematography |
Colin Corby Anthony B. Richmond |
| Edited by | Agnès Guillemot |
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Release date
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Running time
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110 minutes |
| Language | English |
Sympathy for the Devil (originally titled One Plus One by the film director and distributed under that title in Europe) is a 1968 film shot mostly in color by director Jean-Luc Godard.
After May 1968, Godard moved to London to film the Rolling Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil.” In Sympathy for the Devil, Godard juxtaposed the Rolling Stones rehearsing with seemingly unrelated scenes with a soundtrack featuring, among others, the Black Panthers. The film showed the Stones at work, deconstructing the myth of the genius creator.
Composing the film's main narrative thread are several long, uninterrupted shots of The Rolling Stones in London's Olympic Sound 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 milling about in a junkyard littered with the rusting cars heaped upon each other. They read from revolutionary texts (including Amiri Baraka) and toss their rifles to each other, from man to man, as if in an assembly line, or readying for an impending battle. 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, played by Anne Wiazemsky in a yellow peasant dress, in an outdoor wildlife setting, and no matter what she's asked, always answers "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.
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