street performance by LeRoi Jones and associates (a sequence that Godard never intended for the film), Pennebaker doesn’t allow us to think we’ve just happened upon a Harlem happening. After seem- ingly ignoring the camera for a long stretch, Jones leans into the visible boom microphone for empha- sis. Meanwhile neighbors peer down from windows, a young boy snoops from around the corner, and Godard and then-romantic-partner Anne Wiazemsky, perched at a distance, watch from behind a parked car. Who’s in charge in this scene? Is it Godard, pull- ing some long-distance strings? Is it Pennebaker, inches away from the subjects? Is it Jones, who’s orchestrating and orienting the spectacle?
For all of the overt gamesmanship of 1 P.M., it’s in scenes like this one that the genius of its haphaz- ard collaboration is most apparent. So distinct and independent of one another are the participants that everything always seems both objective and
subjective, plotted out and captured on the sly, invested and distanced, sincere and full of shit. And every shot seems less a demonstration of this than an active, laborious contemplation of it. If Godard had once doubted the efficacy of the Leacock-Pennebaker approach, assuming their recessive shooting strategy was a sign of a self-denying point of view, this col- laboration not only explodes that notion but does so, at least to some degree, at Godard’s own expense. 1 P.M. pulls back every curtain, baring everything from the flaws of Cleaver’s thinking (what political activist would today relegate public relations to a future, rather than first, consideration?) to Godard’s amateurishness with the camera (his footage from the concert is all zooms and inelegant pans). But it somehow does so without ever demystifying what brings it all together, which is cinema. Forty- four years later, it’s what makes this snapshot of its moment into something timeless, unclassifiable and unanswerable.
in t e r view with d.a. pennebaker
ERIC HYNES: Reading through the literature from the ’60s, I found it fascinating that this project even hap- pened, considering some of the things Godard had said about your work and Richard Leacock’s work.
D.A. PENNEBAKER, co-director of 1 P.M.: Yeah. He had written something in which he used Ricky’s name, but he called him Pat Leacock, Patricia Leacock. It was peculiar, but certainly Ricky never took much notice
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of it. I think the problem in France was, in order for Jean-Luc or any of the French directors to make a film, it had to come through the government. So there was a kind of ongoing series of essays that appeared in the movie magazine there about the difference between cinéma vérité, as Jean-Luc imagined it, and whatever it was we were practicing in America that was being called that. I’m not sure that anybody took [the criti- cisms] seriously.
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