Last week I finally got around to posting about Jean-Luc Godard’s 87th birthday, and today Open Culture reminded me how rich the master’s collection of odds-and-ends shorts and clips can be. In 1968, Godard shot Jefferson Airplane performing live on a rooftop in Manhattan. Godard’s film features a performance of “The House at Pooneil Corners,” and footage of the band’s inevitable arrest. Here’s a bit from Open Culture and my favorite living film critic, Richard Brody…
“He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”
Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.
Check out the short here…
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