Jean-Luc Godard (1930 - 2022)
“I start to spin the tale / You complain of my diction”: as sung by Tom Verlaine.
But it could’ve been Godard. Lord knows his diction was always out of whack. But just as the key word of Verlaine’s plaint is not “tale,” nor even “diction,” but “spin,” the key word here is “whack.” In Godard’s oeuvre the overriding message is that the tale is there for the spinning. Not “spin” in the 24-hour-news-cycle sense of our constantly refreshed revisionist present. Spin as constant motion. Not spun like a carnival wheel to land on some implausible conclusion, but spun to keep on spinning. Like the plates in a different section of the carnival. Such spinning provides a whack: to the side of the head, to the medium, to time itself. Sure, Godard knew all about Brechtian estrangement, whacking the audience out of their complacent passivity, their acceptance of what they are seeing/reading/hearing. It seems to me that disbelief is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. Why the fuck would anyone ever want to suspend it? Godard taught me that.
Godard came of age in tandem with rock and roll. But rock and roll was never his jam. When his films included music, he preferred classical scores. He made a film called "Faut rêver Mozart." But when Godard dubbed the youth of the sixties the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” he was also, maybe inadvertently, describing the particular predicament of rock and roll, of the counterculture, of America. Mayo Thompson, of the Red Krayola once declared – guitar in hand – that “you cannot be a communist and a philosopher at the same time.” (He attributes the thought to Wittgenstein.) What about an adman? A Costco shopper? A guitar hero or a filmmaker? Can you square the circle by dropping your name from the credits and deferring to the collectivity of the Dziga Vertov (or the Spencer Davis) Group?
Godard did once turn his attention (and his camera) to rock and roll. 1968’s One Plus One is a confounding film for anyone who comes for the Rolling Stones. Footage of the Stones working on preliminary arrangements of the song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” alternates with staged tableaux vivants related to the socio-political events of the late-60s. A group of Black men loiter in an automobile junkyard in London’s Battersea neighborhood, reciting revolutionary texts by African American activists including LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Eldridge Cleaver, distributing rifles, assaulting and murdering a trio of White flower-child women dressed in flowing white gowns. In a paperback bookstore, the proprietor reads aloud from Mein Kampf, while patrons pay for their purchases with Nazi salutes and by slapping the faces of two teenage hippie-boy hostages who spout Maoist and Marxist slogans. A three man film crew – with camera and microphone – traipse through the forest at the heels of an interviewer lobbing political and philosophical questions at a young woman named Eve Democracy (played by Godard’s then-wife Anne Wiazemsky).
When the film premiered at the 1968 London Film Festival, the producers had retitled it “Sympathy for the Devil,” to match the title of the Stones’ song and the film had been re-edited – against Godard’s wishes – to include a finished version of the song. Godard responded by joining producer Iain Quarrier on stage as he introduced the film, only to punch Quarrier out and invite the audience to join him outside for a screening of his own cut under a bridge on the banks of the Thames. (This was nine years before the Sex Pistols rented a boat to sail the same river playing “God Save The Queen” during Elizabeth’s silver jubilee.)
Godard engaged rock and roll, through the personages and prism of the Rolling Stones, in order to do to it what he did to everything. He tore the wires from the circuit boards, held the mechanism to the bright light of skepticism, and spit into its bowels. When One Plus One cuts from the Stones in a state-of-the-art London studio, to the Black radicals reading Baraka and Cleaver, he is holding the one to the other in order to melt them down. In the glare of Baraka who wrote of “Myddle class white boys” stealing Black culture and black life, the Stones go blind. Or truer yet, we go blind watching the Stones. They can no longer make the image that they always are. They dissolve into pastiche imposters at scant remove from their minstrel forebears. But the genius of Godard – really the complication of Godard (and of Marx and Coca Cola) – is the fact that the Stones throw light and heat back at Baraka and Cleaver. The casting and the scripting that are also ideology, politics, identity, emerge as inescapable conditions of both movies and life. That is why Godard was fond of saying that life is a subset of cinema and not the other way around.
Other filmmakers have turned their cameras to rock and roll – Scorcese, Jarmusch, Todd Haynes – but almost inevitably they do so as an act of veneration. (I would point to Penelope Spheeris as a director who allowed contradiction and ambiguity into her rock and roll documentaries.) Godard’s One Plus One is of a piece not with these other rockumentaries, but with his own body of work, his own critical sensibility. Just as he’ll suddenly drop the diegetic sound from a scene to reveal the constructed nature of the mise en scene, introduce a section as “slow motion” to draw our attention to the stilted use of that effect, or splatter cinematically miscolored blood across the hoods of cars and the actors’ shirtfronts for no specifically narrative reason, he’ll push against the Stones, against Black nationalism, against his own Maoism, in order to force us to see it more clearly, to feel it, to discern its shape and meaning. In this context, the Stones are hardly rock gods. (The only god in Godard’s work is the one in his name, and maybe cinema itself.) Instead, the Stones are products of their time, of the burgeoning rock and roll industry, of fashion and technologies, of capitalism itself. As such, they must be pushed against. They must be torn apart. And, if you watch One Plus One a certain way (not necessarily the “right” way), they are indeed torn limb from flouncy-blouse-sleeved limb.
Jean-Luc Godard was of his time too. And this tearing of limbs from limbs was the modus operandi of the times. In France, where rock and roll didn’t take root as it did in the U.S. and the U.K., Godard and his Nouvelle Vague comrades used cinema as their chainsaw.
Godard’s diction was out of whack because the times were out of whack. So he spun his tales without regard for complaints. The diction had to be reinvented. Not just so new tales could be told. That is what many of the other Nouvelle Vaguers were after. It had to be reinvented in Godard’s films so that tales could recede into the work as one element among others – images, sound, and the diction, grammar, and syntax of cinema and of life. Tom Verlaine sings it, “I start to spin the tale / You complain of my diction,” followed by, “You give me friction / But I dig friction.” Godard dug friction too.
