Sympathy for the devil

Sympathy For The Devil (One Plus One), Jean-Luc Godard, UK, 1968, 100m, DCP, English with Spanish subtitles

Godard wanted the film to be called One Plus One.

One: Please allow me to introduce myself, sings Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones rehearse in Olympic Studios in London. It’s 1968. Please allow me to introduce myself. Jean-Luc Godard shoots the recording of Sympathy for the devil in Olympic Studios. Using long takes, Godard takes us through the recording studio and its orange, mustard and green panels. The movie documents the process of creating Sympathy for the devil, the opening track on the album Beggars Banquet (1968). It documents how each band member works, how they play again and again and again, how they start over and over again, and how the percussion and the vocals which come to characterise the song appear in the process. It documents repetition, and everything that happens within it.

One: There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that’s to give up being an intellectual. Godard shoots different scenes with theatrical representations: a TV crew interviews Eva Democracia (Anne Wiazemsky) about relationships between culture and revolution, and her only responses are “Yes” or “No”; members of the Black Panthers argue in a scrapyard, hand out weapons and kill a group of white women; a London bookshop where all its readers can buy pulp fiction or violent and racist books.

Godard wanted the film to be called One Plus One. But One Plus One doesn’t mean that one plus one equals two. It simply means One Plus One, and each viewer has to assemble it in their mind.

In the end, One Plus One was also the reason why Godard punched the director who changed the title of the movie to Sympathy for the Devil.

This movie is being screened in dialogue with the Itziar Okariz exhibition I Never Said Umbrella. “(...) In approaching this presentation I return to a series of images belonging to the recording of the film Sympathy for the Devil by Jean-Luc Godard (1968), featuring the Rolling Stones. They are references that come from different places and which have accompanied me for a long time, and I am interested in relating them to the exhibition so that everything acquires form.” Itziar Okariz, interview by Beatriz Herráez in Orriak 9.