in 1968, jean-luc godard turned his camera on the rolling stones as they developed what would become one of the most iconic tracks of the decade, “sympathy for the devil.” the film, released under two titles—sympathy for the devil and one plus one—splits itself between vérité documentation of the band in the studio and staged political interludes involving black panthers and revolutionary gestures. the structure suggests collision and crossfire, but in practice the halves rarely meet.
the stones sequences remain the centerpiece. watching jagger and company hammer the song into shape—altering rhythms, reworking lyrics, layering percussion—is musically remarkable, a rare document of a classic emerging line by line. godard presents these passages with surprising directness. there is little of his usual formal mischief, only long takes of the band at work. the effect is both hypnotic and instructive: creation as labor, repetition, and gradual refinement. yet this very intensity ends up crowding out the rest of the film. the process is so compelling that it resists being anything but itself.
the intercut material—the revolutionary posturings staged in junkyards and bookstores, the militant tableaux that announce themselves as allegory—sits uneasily beside the music. godard clearly intends these gestures to add charge, but they register more as schematic interruptions. where in other films of this era he could sharpen political rhetoric into biting satire or visionary collage, here the insertions feel curiously inert. it is as if the sheer gravitational pull of the stones at work neutralized his ability to push the other material into sharper focus.
there is speculation about motivation. perhaps godard admired the stones. perhaps the project was a pragmatic collaboration, a way to tether his politics to rock celebrity. either way, the outcome is an odd hybrid: half-documentary, half-agitprop, neither fully realized. in the long arc of godard’s career, it reads as a minor entry—though with godard, even “minor” means watching a master test the limits of his form.
what remains is the fascination of the studio sessions: the raw spectacle of a song destined for immortality passing through its awkward, halting adolescence. that alone makes sympathy for the devil essential. but the film’s larger ambitions—its attempt to merge art, politics, and process into a single cinematic event—never quite cohere.
set against the urgency of la chinoise (1967) or the brutal clarity of weekend (1967), sympathy for the devil feels tentative, less assured in its politics and less inventive in its form. those films distilled the late ’60s into feverish visions; this one drifts. its value lies not in revolution but in the accidental preservation of a song being born