On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen JEAN-LUC RAVES AGAIN BY JOHN SIMON Woodstock, the film by Michael Wadleigh, might seem to be the opposite of Pattern; but, as I suggested last time, it really isn't. The epic of peace...
...The leitmotif is a session with the Rolling Stones, who are seen recording their song...
...walk out on it in disgust...
...It is merely the jiggling of Halloween paper-cutout skeletons, the sound and fury of an idiot who cannot even tell a tale...
...But that the piddling over a tenth-rate piece of pop music, photographed in the most languorously repetitive way, should become a metaphor for anything but the debauched values of our time, strikes me as absurd...
...Why should well-paid, bourgeois film reviewers, like the New York Times' Vincent Canby and Roger Green-spun, both publish Pantherish raves about it...
...Why is it not being distributed as leaflets, pamphlets or blackboards...
...In between the black militant, Eve Democracy and Rolling Stone sequences, we are treated to those famous Godard titles, captions fraught with punning and anagram-matic wisdom...
...His films, Godard added, serve as blackboards...
...None are self-evident...
...Even if that were true, it would still be a pitiful attempt at verbal wit...
...Why should ordinary filmgoers be expected to pay money for it...
...Though Woodstock's hours of coverage (and extended use of the split screen, usually in threefold images, makes its three hours seem at least six) give you a sense of the largeness of the crowd and the porten-tousness of the event, the film barely probes the meaning behind the superficies...
...The bits of interviews with various people are only enough to arouse a curiosity they do not begin to satisfy...
...Yet Woodstock has its jokes...
...People don't need images...
...Sympathy for the Devil is not, however, the dance of death for bourgeois society Godard would have it be, nor the scourge of black revolutionaries whose dilatoriness it is meant to sting into action...
...Joseph Morgenstern, in Newsweek, calls this "a grand metaphor for growth...
...The movie is an ideological product...
...But this the filmmakers, through blindness or dishonesty, avoided...
...or else, three abducted white girls in white nightgowns are being pawed on camera, or, off-camera, raped, buggered and shot to the reading of Eldridge Cleaver's descriptions of his lust for white girls...
...Thus we get the benefit of hearing it all in duplicate...
...This time around, the lettering on the screen is illegible, and the word games farfetched and unfunny...
...And as if this were not enough, Godard keeps introducing his homely and untalented wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in a number of preposterous scenes, as a character called Eve Democracy...
...Although the film was made in England, it is meant, one presumes, to comment on the American situation...
...It's still 100 per cent controlled by imperialists...
...For example, "Sight anD Sound," meaning that England's favorite film-buff magazine equals Students for a Democratic Society...
...I suppose that what is so truly dreadful about Godard is that even his jokes—for he makes them, occasionally—are utterly mirthless, chillingly excogitated, mean...
...We need to change the ideology that makes the Bank of America possible...
...That may mean stop making a movie...
...1 guess, is so sheer, it is positively threadbare...
...or getting shot literally in the end, in a filmed-within-filmed black uprising...
...They tell other revolutionary groups how it's coming, what to do, what not to do...
...You may ask how I know about the buggery...
...While weaving in and out of the shrubbery, Eve Democracy ponders these grave posers she is pelted with, and, after three or four seconds of profound meditation, disburses her oracular answers...
...there is no sense of humor whatever in Jean-Luc Godard's latest abomination, 1 + 1, also known as Sympathy for the Devil...
...We need to produce few images and lots of sounds, which have been suppressed...
...Alternating with this, he provides us with bits of political-philosophical comic strips that are even more appalling...
...Sympathy for the Devil...
...And why should News-week's Morgenstern write "the informing idea is sheer genius...
...When I understood that money is the ruling force, like Marx said, I turned into a revolutionary...
...There we sit hungry for bread, and Godard gives us Stones...
...And why should Godard expect it to move or persuade anyone not already in his camp...
...Eve is either being interviewed for the benefit of a film within a film that is being shot...
...1 mean not just laudable opposition to the war, but also profound neurotic hostility...
...Maitre Godard has been touring the country with one of his latest masterpieces, See You at Mao or British Sounds, and after each screening he answers student questions...
...We have here, presumably, another grand metaphor for the pettifogging aspects of this as yet inadequate revolution...
...At other times, one Negro will endlessly be reading an inflammatory text to another black, who slowly repeats it to his tape-recorder...
...blood, to be sure, is all right, but flesh would be demeaning...
...A callow youth with a microphone pursues the picturesquely gotten-up Miss Wiazemsky all over a woodsy landscape, among trees and around bushes, while pitching elaborately neo-Marxist questions at her—questions couched in sentences of Proustian length, to which the answer is either Yes or No...
...Imperialism has produced images, but almost no sound...
...Relentlessly, in recurrent scene after scene, Godard rubs our eyes and ears and, above all, our noses in the mess...
...Meanwhile the cameraman in the film scrambles about, cables are jiggled around, the interviewer (who is also the film-within-the-film's director) flips the pages of his notebook, and the whole thing adds up to a splendid tribute to conjugal love: Since Mme Godard, alias Mile Wiazemsky, alias Eve Democracy is obviously too inept to improvise answers, these elaborate Yes-or-No questions had to be specially prefabricated in her husband's uxoriously solicitous brain...
...He shows us a bunch of black militants encamped in an automobile graveyard, where they mostly read aloud from various pamphlets and books while guns are being passed around...
...The epic of peace and the epic of war exhibit disturbing resemblances, not the least of which is reveling in elephantine dimensions...
...We are obliged to watch these five scruffy types plink-ing and plunking away, and hear Mick Jagger repeat the same lyric over and over again...
...Why shouldn't sane film critics, as the New Statesman's John Coleman did...
...Some genius...
...But if his fun is the lip-less laughter of the skull, his indignation, which makes up most of his filmic content these days, is the rattling of dry bones...
...My favorite sequence is the one where guns are being hurled from left to right of the screen, going from hand to hand, until they reach the anchor man, who neatly piles them on the bodies of two blood-smeared white girls (the cadavers still have their nightgowns on—lest the important ideas involved be degraded to mere flesh and blood...
...The interview scene is particularly insufferable...
...Here are some of his utterances: "We are making a political film, in a political way...
...What is distressing about most of the performers at this mammoth mud-in, apart from their obvious lack of musical talent, is, in most cases, their equally obvious hostility...
...the posture and state of the bleeding corpses reveals it...
...What we get instead is the obligatory scenes of nude lovemaking and bathing, and an inordinate amount of the entertainment, which the majority of the throng could neither see nor properly hear, and did not come for in the first place...
...In between, we see her scrawling Godardian quasi-clever political jeux d'esprit on everything from the plate glass of the London Hilton, where she is staying, to bridges, billboards, parked cars, and any other surface that will stand still long enough to be smeared with a sophomoric slogan...
...It is a case of three-dimensional dementia: verbal, cinematic, and ideological...
...It is cinema-verite at two removes from verite, and heaven only knows how many from cinema...
...In view of what happened at the next major rock rally at Altamont, it was incumbent on the filmmakers to search out the seeds of violence that Woodstock also contained?for instance, in the lukewarm reception accorded the milder performers, and the furious acclaim reserved for the rabblerousers...
...Hollywood is just a branch in ideology of the cia...
...If, in its finished version, the Stones' song were Woz-zeck or Strauss' Four Last Songs, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I could see using its evolution as a persuasive metaphor for something —artistic growth, most likely, not universal growth...
...I am no great admirer of our national anthem for either its artistic or patriotic merits, but to hear and watch what Jimi Hendrix does to it —something ineffably ugly, inhuman, and hate-riddled—almost had me running for shelter to the nearest American Legion post...
...It is all indescribably uncinematic and boring...
...When the girls are completely covered with guns, he starts removing the guns and tossing them from right to left across the screen, where they again go flying from hand to hand of picturesquely stationed blacks amid automobile corpses, while offscreen, we hear a random fusillade...
...Still another time, two black girl reporters interview one of these revolutionaries, and are given long, possibly improvised, answers redolent with bellicose platitudes...
...This is all very touching, but why should it have to be judged as cinema...
...Even if the stuff were bearable to begin with, it would not be so the bumpteenth time around...
...The Daily Texan has reported some of Godard's statements to the students of the University of Texas...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 10
