Table of Contents
![Three Great Documentaries to Stream](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/12/22/arts/sympathy/sympathy-facebookJumbo.jpg)
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (1970)
Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.
The most well-known documentary to center the Rolling Stones is almost certainly “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers’ chronicle of the band’s 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway, a movie that infamously captured the fatal stabbing of a concertgoer. But the weirdest documentary the Stones have appeared in is “Sympathy for the Devil,” first shown in 1968. The director was none other than Jean-Luc Godard, in the process of pivoting between the brilliance of “Weekend” and the barely watchable politicized films he would make with what was called the Dziga Vertov Group. In the recent documentary “Godard Cinema,” “Sympathy for the Devil” is held up as the director’s last bourgeois film before the rupture.
Far more interested in process than product, “Sympathy for the Devil” cuts back and forth between the Stones in the recording studio as they refine what would become one of their best-known songs, and scattered material that Godard shot around London. The studio sessions are hypnotic; the camera tracks around the room in lengthy shots as the Stones try to find a groove, although they’re often undercut by metallic-sounding voice-over from what Roger Greenspun, reviewing the film for The New York Times in 1970, described as a “now famous pornographic political novel,” whose text Godard uses as an alienation effect.
In between clips of the band, Godard intersperses various provocations: scenes of Black militants operating from a junkyard by the Thames; a bizarre interlude at a book and magazine shop where a man in Elton John-style glasses reads from “Mein Kampf,” and heiling Hitler appears to be part of the checkout procedure; and Godard’s then-wife, Anne Wiazemsky, playing a person called Eve Democracy, who responds yes or no — mostly yes — to nonsensical questions from a television reporter. Graffiti and hand-painted title cards engage in Godard’s customary wordplay, albeit this time in English (“FBI + CIA = TWA + PANAM”). An unbroken closing shot exposes the machinery of tracking, craning and tilting.