Monday, February 2, 2009

Sympathy for the Devil (1968)--4/5

Sorry, "That Thing You Do!" In the small company of movies with a title song repeated countless times, "Sympathy For the Devil" has got you beat. Using uninterrupted shots, Jean-Luc Godard’s film details the evolution of the “Beggars Banquet” track. Starting out at half-tempo, the song picks up speed, percussion, and backup singers (the famous “woo-woo”). Lyrics—disturbing in their divergence from the eventual track—come into their final form. E.g. the opening line “Please allow me to introduce myself” starts off as the syllable-deficient “Please let me introduce myself.”

It’s a great song, and it clearly disturbs Godard to have captured something so openly entertaining. In counterpoint, half of “Sympathy For The Devil” is devoted to equally-lengthy swaths of Marxist propaganda, Black Power training, and inversions of celebrity culture. It’s your typical Godard wankery, made expressly to be unpacked by film theorists.

But it works! Godard has long known the formula to making entertaining proselytization. Because of their obnoxious length, the disparate strands of "Sympathy for the Devil" have time to freely bounce off of one another. Processes and meanings confront the audience, lessening the importance of simple actions. The afterimage is a not-unpleasant melange of patterns, repetition, and style. Godard leaves the usual linear satisfaction of films to those with standard narratives.


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