"Sympathy for the Devil"

HK is currently running a Jean-Luc Godard film festival down in the HK Film Archives in Sai Wan Ho. Went last night to see his 1968 film about the Rolling Stones "Sympathy for the Devil" on the mistaken impression it was the Rolling Stones film "Gimme Shelter" about the 1969 Altamount stabbing:



"Gimme Shelter" was a documentary which, as it turns out, all of us had seen as kids - all fake ID and attitude - and we wanted to know if it was as good as we remembered, thus we rocked up and instead got ...



Honestly! All I can say is that it's a warning to us all about not mixing up the titles of films we saw as kids.

It's really sad how dated "Sympathy for the Devil" is, and just SAD that anyone ever saw this as a film about "Revolution". Gosh, wasn't Jean-Luc was some bourgeois git imagining that the Rolling Stones were in the same paradigm as the Black Panters; that they were fellow revolutionaries with a similar message of the overthrow of the capitalist state. Mmmm, Mick Jagger was already, by 1968, a big time capitalist entrepreneur and property developer - his year at the London School of Economics already paying off in big dividends - and certainly didn't want a revolution.

And those Black Panthers. Straight from Jean-Luc's uber-bourgeois mind, and just so very, very sad, although it's cute when you see that the actors are trying not to laugh.

However, the Rolling Stones part of this ... I don't know what to call it ... mockumentary? isn't dated at all, but what this footage should have, it doesn't have, thanks to Godard's Brechtian techniques of disassociation and distanciation: it should be a film of the Rolling Stones at the height of their beauty and their charisma, but instead it's all endless footage of the backs of their heads, or bits of them glimpsed from behind other things. So annoying!

But nonetheless, what you DO have with this film is an astonishing historical record of The Rolling Stones in action. Boy, are these guys something else! It's amazing to see their week in the studio putting together "Sympathy for the Devil". Where you aware that, in its first incarnation, this song sounded like something The Monkees would do? All cute and ditzy and Hammond organ. But then, as the days passed, the Stones powered it up and by the end had effortlessly given it such a depth and groove and funk, and turned it from Ditz to something dark and sinister and powerful and you're left awestruck at how any group of musicians can be so VASTLY talented.

Oh, and afterwards, at this cute "French" cafe near the Archives, everyone was talking about how they never before realised that Brian Jones was already "finished" as a musician by 1968. "I always thought Mick Jagger stole the band from Brian Jones." said David, "But, from this, it looks like Brian Jones gave it away." And, yes, there is very little contribution from Brian into making this song into the Rock-n-Roll Classic it is, and by the end of the week, when it starts being seriously, seriously good, he isn't even there.

So, I guess that's the value of this film: watching how Masters-of-the-CRAFT turn GOOD into GREAT, and to address the perception we all share that Mick Jagger was the bad guy in his coup of The Rolling Stones. He wasn't the bad guy; he was actually saving the band from a once-vastly talented individual who'd already, thanks to drugs and anger, thrown it all away.

And if you want to see the finished product in all its glory, here's all the 8 minutes and 18 seconds of it.

And please note John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the audience going wild!