One Plus One

If you add one plus one together, what should you get? Construction. If you take one and split it down the centre and make two, what have you got? Destruction. Godard's film is about a number of things simultaneously, as all films are. (What film is not "about" words and images in one sense or another?) In par tic u lar, One Plus One is concerned with re- examining the nature of language, of words or the systems which are supposed to resemble language at this precise moment in time. Because, as never before, the very nature of language as a means of thinking and/or communication is severely threatened . . . there is a revolution going in within language, and if language does not survive, then, so Godard seems to suggest, then MAN, as a thinking and communicating animal, may not continue to exist either. In his pessimistic reduction of language to a series of fragments of meaningless despair, Godard has created a film whose very structure symbolises the dislocation of Being and Existence that threatens us all. The film comprises three very distinct situations. Continuously throughout the film, The Rolling Stones are in a recording studio CONSTRUCTING words and musical fragments into the unified whole that their finished song becomes in the film. Word by word, fragment by fragment, these young men confront the fragmentation of the world, which has always been the subject of their work, and forge together for us, a disciplined work of art which embodies and communicates to us, its message . . . its subject . . . its content . . . its truth. This is a truth, this language of their pop music, that many people refuse to acknowledge as valid, that almost no one has seriously tried to analyse, but which is immediately recognised and accepted by literally millions of young people all over the world. It is the language of their revolution. But language, as it happens, was based on the musical language created by American Negro singers and musicians. The second sequence of situations which are intercut in parallel with the images of construction are images of destruction- The pornographic, obscene, and tragic destruction of meaning, truth, and validity in language by the MEDIA. By which Godard means, in this film, as in most of his others, the language of Tele vi sion and the language of American Pop Pulp Culture; from the first, the techniques of an interview and from the second, excerpts from a semi- pornographic crime thriller novelette. Through the whole film, to compensate for the destruction of the narrative continuity usually in the words, the film is shot in one long single un- cut visual image. The image is continuous, because the soundtrack is fragmentary. The world, as image, holds together, even if our thinking about it is no longer even related to it. Between these two series of long takes, there are very short "commercials," lasting a few seconds each time. In each one, the girl (Anna Wiazemsky) paints a slogan on the wall, as a commercial for the revolution! A revolution of language also . . . fragments of words grouping for unity. The two possibilities then are, one, construction, or the other, destruction. The one, the music of the Stones, might be accepted as the non- rational . . . it is music . . . it is mostly feeling and emotion, a language of communication which does not "contain" verbal thinking; it does not need words. Mick Jagger, even when he does use words in song, he is constructing it to invalidate the words . . . they are barely reasonable! They counterpoint the emotion of the music and exist uneasily on its surface, a last homage to disappearing reason. Their music is the body of the film . . . the sensual communication of feeling. The remainder of the film, then, is the destruction of reason- which is, of course, madness. How are words invalidated? By constant use, and misuse. There was a time when even the sign **** in a magazine would make schoolmasters in Sandersted apoplectic with rage! …