The Unforeseen Journey From Jean-Luc G-dard's 1 AM To D.A. Pennebaker's 1 PM
https://cinemasojourns.com/2018/04/23/the-unforeseen-journey-from-jean-luc-G-dards-1-am-to-d-a-pennebakers-1-pm/
The Unforeseen Journey From Jean-Luc G-dard's 1 AM To D.A. Pennebaker's 1 PM
With more than 100 feature films, shorts, video and TV work to his credit, Jean-Luc G-dard is surely the most audacious, groundbreaking and prolific filmmaker from his generation. Even longtime admirers and film historians have probably not seen all of his work and some of it like the political cinema he made with Jean-Pierre Gorin under the collaborative name Groupe Dziga Vertov is tough going for even the most ardent G-dard completist. Weekend (1967) is generally acknowledged as the last film G-dard made before heading in a more experimental, decidedly non-commercial direction which roughly stretched from 1969 until 1980 when he reemerged from the wilderness with the unexpected art house success, Sauve qui peut (Every Man for Himself). But most of the work he made during that eleven year period prior to 1980 championed social and political change through ideological scenarios and leftist diatribes that were overly cerebral and static compared to earlier career milestones like Breathless (1960), Contempt (1963) and Pierrot le Fou (1965).
Of the films he made during the Groupe Dziga Vertov period, only Tout Va Bien (1972), which starred Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, attracted mainstream critical attention but most of the reviews at the time were indifferent or hostile to this Marxist, Bertolt Brecht-inflluenced polemic about a workers' strike at a sausage factory. Much more interesting to me was the film he attempted to make in 1969, tentatively titled 1 AM (or One American Movie). A collaboration with cinema-verite pioneers D. A. Pennabaker and Richard Leacock, the project was abandoned after G-dard lost interest during the editing phase but Pennebaker ended up completing his own version of the existing footage which he titled 1 PM (or One Parallel Movie). This is a brief history of the film's journey from concept to screen.
The genesis for 1 AM can be traced back to the early 1960s when G-dard first encountered such cinema verite works as Robert Drew's Primary (1960), which followed presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey as they campaigned during the 1960 Wisconsin primary. Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles served as cinematographers on Primary with D.A. Pennebaker serving as sound recordist and sequence editor; All three would go on to become major figures in the cinema verite movement but G-dard was suspicious of this new approach to documentary filmmaking. In fact, he had criticized Leacock in print on aesthetic grounds for promoting the idea that you could capture reality in the raw without acknowledging the presence of the camera or a crew. G-dard also attacked Primary for its inability or disinterest in shedding light on how the U.S. political process worked.
Despite this, G-dard remained curious about the direct cinema movement (cinema verite) and when he met Pennebaker in the early 1960s at the Cinémathèque in Paris, he proposed a potential film collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock. "The idea was that [G-dard] would go to a small town in France," Pennebaker recalled (in D.A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie) and he would rig it with all kind of things happening: people would fall out of windows, people would shoot other people, whatever. We would arrive one day on a bus or something with our cameras and then film whatever we saw happening around us."
That project never materialized but a turning point occurred in 1968 with the release of Monterey Pop, directed and filmed by Pennebaker with contributions from Leacock, Maysles and others. This historic record of the 1967 three day concert event at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in California featuring Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others was a resounding commercial success and enabled Pennebaker and Leacock to add a distribution outlet to their production company. As a result, they acquired the U.S. rights to G-dard's La Chinoise (1967) and brought him to America in 1968 to tour with the film at selected openings.
It was during his U.S. visit that G-dard became convinced that America was on the brink of a societal breakdown. With Pennebaker and Leacock employed as his cameramen, G-dard began shooting footage for a new film tentatively titled 1 AM which would be both a portrait of contemporary America but also a meditation on documentary and fictional approaches to cinematic representations. Originally G-dard planned to structure the film in ten sequences: "Five reality scenes, in which subjects recount their experiences, and five fictionalized counterparts in which actors would speak a transcript of the words spoken in the "documentary" scenes." (from D.A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie).
During filming, G-dard begin to deviate from his original plan by replacing some of his original interview subjects with last minute improvis