French director Henry Chapier’s 1968 documentary American Summer is a companion piece to Sex-Power which DM featured a couple of months ago. What I said about that film applies to American Summer: ” Revolution has never been sexier, more romantic, existential or just plain goofy when seen through the prism of the nouvelle vague.”

In American Summer we’re confronted with a bunch of white California militants who’ve aligned themselves with the Black Panther movement during the trial of Huey Newton. The film captures a moment in which the youth movement of the Sixties was becoming restless with passive forms of resistance against the Vietnam War and civil inequality, a time in which giving peace a chance was being supplanted by a naive and relatively unrealistic notion of revolution. The ideology was becoming more radical and language more provocative, but little action was actually being taken by the children of privilege. It was mostly a theoretical revolution composed of words and salutes. “In dreams begin responsibilities”...but most of us were still dreamers.

Featuring clips from speeches given by Black Panther party militants, an interview with Black Panther Party information secretary Kathleen Cleaver, concerts, a Black Panther military parade and music by Quicksilver Messenger Service.
 

 
‘Sex-Power’: Rarely seen French film about the Sixties with Jane Birkin

 
I love it when European directors try to wrap their heads around America in the Sixties. I’m thinking of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil and the film I’m sharing here, Henry Chapier’s Sex-Power. Revolution has never been sexier, more romantic, existential or just plain goofy when seen through the prism of the nouvelle vague.

Sex-Power is a sweet bit of candy-colored psychedelic fluff with an astringent dose of agit-prop militancy in its chewy center. While most of the film is in English there is occasional French dialog without the benefit of English subtitles, but you hardly need to know French to get the gist of what is happening. This is the tale of a young Frenchman who arrives in Northern California looking to forget a lost love (Jane Birkin) and ends up encountering various forms of feminine power as embodied by Bernadette Lafonte as Salome and Catherine Marshall as “la fille moderne.” The film moves through space and time in an impressionistic, lysergic dreaminess.

Directed by film critic and journalist Henry Chapier in 1970, Sex-Power has a lovely soundtrack by Vangelis and luscious cinematography by Edmond Richard.

Released the same year as El Topo and Zabriskie Point, Chapier’s film has some striking desert imagery that can’t help but recall those films. More than likely a case of cosmic synchronicity as opposed to influence, given they were all made at the same time.