“I think that the future for a revolutionary cinema is an amateur cinema.” —JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1968
“I seem to remember JLG getting frustrated that he couldn’t tell whether Leacock or Pennebaker were filming their own film about the film he was making or shooting for him.”
—TOM LUDDY, 1 P.M. COLLABORATOR, IN 2007
It was like a Sixties-era cineaste supergroup. And like all such assemblages, it was destined to dissemble, to be a dream team deferred, to elicit a mess of metaphors pitting sums versus parts. Over here you had the inexhaustible trailblazers of Direct Cinema, the most celebrated and pejoratively pegged flies on the wall, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Over there you had the notorious JLG, Jean-Luc Godard, the international arthouse superstar turned ardent political provocateur. Throw in Method acting madman Rip Torn, rock ‘n’ drug culture messengers Jefferson Airplane, cult heroic polemicists Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, national leader for Students for a Democratic Society Tom Hayden, and black nationalist poet LeRoi Jones (the soon-to-be Amiri Baraka), and you pretty much had boho-’60s- rabble rousing incarnate.
The story is that it didn’t really come together. The story is of bafflements, bruised egos, and abandon- ment—a film left unfinished, and participants free to foster their legends elsewhere. Yet that story is
ultimately irrelevant to the cinematic record, to what you can actually see with your eyes.
1 P.M. isn’t just undefined. The overwhelming limin- ality of the project far exceeds any single dearth of definition. Mounted by three filmmakers of differing styles and intentions, at an historical moment full of confusion, conflict and (real and illusory) potential, composed of footage both captured and planned, with a tone that’s arch and sincere, grave and giddy, a document disowned by Godard and reclaimed by Pennebaker, a film that went through as many work- ing titles as directors, 1P.M. is undefined defined. It’s also peerless.
That it’s recalled as more of a curiosity rather than as a major work actually reflects, if not honors, its inbetweenness. It doesn’t really serve as a represen- tative work of Jean-Luc Godard’s political period, or as an exemplar of the D.A. Pennebaker-Richard Leacock Direct Cinema model. Despite Godard’s ambitions, it doesn’t well serve either the American
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