while dressed as an Indian chief in Central Park. Then the act moves to an in-progress skyscraper, with Torn riding the construction elevator, tape player tucked under his arm, chewing over every scrap of Hayden’s Marxist rhetorical playback while actual workers look on, unengaged. So when the activist finally appears on-camera, delivering the disquisition that has been the source of the audio we’ve been enduring, we can’t help but find him tedious and, like Pennebaker’s camera, avert our attention to the groovily attired backyard assembly, as well as to the apparently rapt Godard, who nonchalantly puffs on his cigar before slipping out of view.
Later in the film, the evidently entirely humorless Hayden expresses frustration with the circling cam- eras and intrusive equipment, particularly since “the method is to make it appear natural.” Godard seems almost delighted to set him straight. “No, I don’t mean to. It’s the reverse of natural,” he says. “It’s totally not. Because it’s completely abstract. To seem natural is to do something else. Art is not natural.” Even among fellow political travelers in this moment of presumed revolution, Godard is still making, talking, and privi- leging the stubborn, impractical beast that is art.
Yet so are Leacock and Pennebaker. Never merely the straight men monitoring the carnival, as JLG may have envisioned them, they’re active participants in stomping over the line between documentary and fiction, seriousness and absurdity. When Godard abandoned the project before completing the ambi- tious construction he’d planned for the footage, it fell to Pennebaker to assemble the film we have today
(completed and finally released in 1971), which asserts a point of view removed from Godard’s poker-faced ringleader, and employs footage largely captured by Pennebaker himself (prompting JLG to dub the film, with perhaps begrudging respect, “One Pennebaker Movie”). When Torn engages the school kids from Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, reciting the words of a well-meaning but condescending white “oppres- sor” while wearing both Confederate and U.S. Military garb (“I want to develop you!” he barks), Pennebaker’s camera is just as interested in Godard’s orchestration of the scene—scooting from the back to the front of the classroom to whisper into Torn’s ear—and in the crew’s intrusion into the space. We’re never certain what the game is here, or what we (or the students) are supposed to gain from Torn’s antics, but we can see Leacock laughing heartily, evidently charmed by the kids and the general sense of play. He’s too engaged, and buzzing too excitedly, to be a mere fly on the wall.
For standard-bearers of clear-the-way filmmaking, Leacock and Pennebaker seemingly exult in this chance to get in the way—of the subjects, of New York bystanders, of Godard. When Godard interviews a young banker on a crowded city street by radio mic, Pennebaker’s camera confirms that the crew is a walking spectacle of equipment, conspicuously lum- bering through the streets before being accosted by corporate security. They’re mobile, as filmmak- ers suddenly were thanks to sync sound advances in the ’60s (thanks, as it were, to Pennebaker himself), but far from discreet. Even in what appears to be the most vérité sequence, a fluidly shot poetic/musical
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