Sympathy for the Devil

In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard was regarded as an audacious and brilliant filmmaker who was turning cinema upside down. In the turbulent days of May that year he was a Maoist oracle mounting the barricades. Then he moved to swinging London to shoot his first English-language film: 1 + 1.

His 1967 film Weekend, which ends provocatively with the words “FIN DE CINEMA,” was highly acclaimed, but 1 + 1 got a critical reception, with philosopher Guy Debord describing it as “a film from an idiot”. Audiences stayed away in droves, both from that version and the one released by the British producers as Sympathy for the Devil, which took its title from the classic Rolling Stones track whose fascinating genesis this film captures.

The Stones rehearsals are intercut with Black Power texts, footage of Anne Wiazemsky roaming the streets with a graffiti spray can, and fictional scenes in which sex shop customers pay for porn magazines by hitting Maoists and doing a Hitler salute. “1 + 1 isn’t 2, it’s just one plus one,” asserted the film’s creator, as if to clarify his standpoint on this blistering cocktail of aphorisms, political statements and rock mythology.