Director Kevin Macdonald captures both a moment in the rock stars lives and American history through the lens of television.
In the fall of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved into an apartment on 105 Bank Street in the West Village of Manhattan.
Kevin Macdonald’s archival documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” chronicles the 18 months when Lennon and Ono lived in their West Village apartment. The impetus for the film, however, stems from the recently restored footage of Lennon’s “One to One” benefit concert, which sought to raise money for Willowbrook State School, a sorely underfunded, scandalous institution for special needs children whose poor conditions were initially publicized on television by Geraldo Rivera. It was the only time he played a full-length show after leaving the Beatles and it was previously released to the public in a highly compromised form.
The footage from the concert, which Macdonald intersperses throughout the film, complete with remastered sound courtesy of Sean Ono Lennon, is remarkable. Backed by the psych-rock music of the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band, Lennon sounds focused and lively as he runs through songs from his solo releases, including “Power to the People” and “Imagine,” and Macdonald especially highlights Ono’s material from the show as well, which, much like her recorded music, presage the No Wave movement by roughly a decade.
John, upon landing in America, became obsessed with American television, especially the sheer amount of channels available to him. By all accounts, he spent an exorbitant amount of time watching TV in his bed, so Macdonald and his editor Sam Rice-Edwards (also credited as a co-director) recreate this experience by sequencing much of the film as if an off-screen Lennon is flipping through channels in 1971 and ’72.
It’s a compelling structural gambit, one that eschews talking-head interviews with Lennon’s contemporaries and, crucially, sidesteps strained attempts to say anything new about the man, an all-but-impossible task. When Macdonald commits to the TV framework, he and Rice-Edwards create a captivating visual collage that juxtaposes the relatively banal, like Frosted Flakes commercials and “The Price is Right,” against images from the Attica Prison riot or the George Wallace assassination attempt, not to mention the unceasing coverage of Vietnam. In between, we see Lennon and Ono leverage their celebrity in televised interview appearances to promote left politics and highlight the efforts of activists like Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg. At its best, “One to One” accomplishes the ambitious task of conjuring a time fraught with sociopolitical tension, of which Lennon and Ono were smack dab in the middle, via a medley of televisual snippets.
“One to One,” however, digresses from this structure by incorporating archival footage from various rallies as well as previously unreleased material like home videos and phone call recordings of Lennon and Ono talking to close associates. The phone calls are especially revealing: you hear Ono vulnerably tell musician David Peel about the experience of being a victim of character assassination on the part of abusive strangers and the chauvinistic press; you hear Lennon insist his appearances at protests won’t lead to an assassination attempt. Lennon also explicitly confirms that he’s recording his calls out of self-preservation given that the FBI was tapping his phone because the Nixon administration considered him a subversive figure.
Macdonald’s film doesn’t exactly require a narrative; a scattered portrait of a scattered time feels like an appropriate way to depict Lennon and Ono at that particular moment, and the archival and television footage speaks volumes on its own. A throughline eventually emerges involving Lennon and Ono committing to and then ultimately retreating from confrontational left politics. While Lennon gladly participates in events like the John Sinclair Freedom Rally and tries to organize a “Free the People” tour that would unite the nation’s youth against Nixon, he eventually finds himself disillusioned by the more combative elements in his activist circle. When Rubin suggests to Lennon that he play a rally at the 1972 RNC in Miami, Lennon declines citing his discomfort with Rubin planning to lead young people into a violent confrontation with the police.
The One to One benefit particularly stems from Lennon and Ono’s shared sensitivity towards children, with Macdonald’s film highlighting the custody battle of Yoko´s daughter, Kyoko. Lennon and Ono’s search for Kyoko was a major reason why they moved to the States and Ono would only reunite with her in 1998, almost 20 years after Lennon’s murder.
🟠BEATLES STORES (Associated with Amazon, Shipments Worldwide)￫ HERE , HERE & HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment