counterculture or the revolutionary radicalism of the ’60s. It’s too contrived to fit snugly into documentary, too shambling to succeed as a stunt, too conflicted and complex to make a statement. Revisiting it, and the moment it captures, is to have preconceptions frustrated, historical and formal narratives derailed. In exchange, it remains, 44 years on, momentous, alive, thrillingly uncertain. For all of its recited philos- ophies and symbolic gestures, 1 P.M. isn’t an idea— it’s thinking.
The lead-up to that thinking, as told by the filmmak- ers, their collaborators, and assorted historians and biographers, goes something like this: Fresh from the revolutionary events of May ’68 in Paris, Godard was convinced that the agitating wave was about to crest in America. He’d spent the early part of ’68 on a tour of American college campuses to support his film La Chinoise—a tour organized by the film’s distributor, which was none other than Leacock- Pennebaker—and apparently felt the tide rise. With financing in place, courtesy of New York public tele- vision, Godard conspired to shoot Hayden, Jones and Jefferson Airplane in New York, and then Cleaver in California.
Considering some of Godard’s statements from earlier in the decade, the pairing with Leacock and Pennebaker was a curious one. Via his platform at Cahiers du Cinéma, he voiced distrust in Leacock’s work, particularly for its evident pretensions to clear- eyed objectivity. In 1963, Godard accused Leacock and company of “not knowing what they are shoot- ing, nor knowing that pure reportage does not exist.”
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He continued: “Leacock’s lack of subjectivity leads him in the end to lack objectivity. Honesty, in other words, is not enough for a fighter in the avant-garde, particu- larly when he does not know that if reality is stranger than fiction, the latter returns the compliment.”
Yet Godard had long been preoccupied with the documentary potential of film, and that only inten- sified as he became more interested in recording and understanding the unfolding events of the late 1960s. By 1968, and particularly in 1 P.M., Godard saw increased value in a more reactive and improvisatory camera—not necessarily as an overriding machine of objectivity, but as a useful aspect in often materially contradictory constructions, whether documenting fictions (Rip Torn’s Brechtian hijinks) or fabricating seemingly straightforward recordings (a Jefferson Airplane rooftop concert, which predates similar, more celebrated sequences in both Let It Be and Rattle & Hum). Everything in 1 P.M. is shot with the same busy curiosity, simultaneously offering an astonish- ingly rich record of its time and place, and, by dint of the filmmakers’ many fabrications, offering an auto- critique of cinéma vérité itself.
For as much as Godard wanted to capture America in this moment of presumed transformation, and honor the leading architects of that transformation, he couldn’t help but monkey with the process, to per- vert dry rhetoric and mystify what the camera threat- ened to make plain. Before we even meet Hayden, he’s heard in cacophonous piecemeal via Torn’s tape player, his words doled out in abstracted, stop-start bursts that the actor slavishly (mockingly?) parrots
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