Sympathy for the Devil and more
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Sympathy for the Devil
1968. Great Britain. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Martin Scorsese, in an interview: “Sympathy for the Devil: now that's quintessential. That movie, with the vignettes that Godard intercuts with the rehearsal sessions…[a] still powerful and disturbing movie. It makes you rethink; it redefines your way of looking at life and reality and politics.” Keith Richards, in his memoir Life: “Politics came for us whether we liked it or not, once in the odd personage of Jean-Luc Godard, the great French cinematic innovator….Sympathy for the Devil is by chance a record of the song by us of that name being born in the studio. The song turned after many takes from a Dylanesque, rather turgid folk song into a rocking samba—from a turkey into a hit—by a shift of rhythm, all recorded in stages by Jean-Luc….I’m glad he filmed that, but Godard!....The film was a total load of crap—the maidens on the Thames barge, the blood, the feeble scene of some brothers, aka Black Panthers, awkwardly handling weapons to one another in a Battersea scrap yard….I mean, why of all people, would Jean-Luc Godard be interested in a minor hippie revolution in England and try to translate it into something else?” Print lent by the BFI; courtesy ABKCO Music & Records. 100 min.
Invocation of My Demon Brother
1969. USA. Directed by Kenneth Anger. Sound by Mick Jagger. Using a then-novel Moog synthesizer, Jagger composed a hypnotic, droning soundtrack for Anger’s masterful Invocation, a film whose satanic majesty lies in its hallucinatory concatenation of still-frightening images, sounds, and ecstatic pagan rituals involving an albino seer, a helicopter of Marines landing in Vietnam, and a cat funeral; naked boys wrestling and tarot cards, swastikas, and spider tattoos; Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull at the Hyde Park memorial concert for Brian Jones; Manson Family member and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil presiding as Lucifer over his psychedelic band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz; and Hells Angels and hippies superimposed with Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco. 11 min.