Film-maker Kevin Macdonald has created a fever dream of pop culture: a TV-clip collage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s time in New York in the early 70s, as they led the countercultural protest. It’s a film that mixes small screen zeitgeist fragments and madeleine moments, a memory quilt of a certain time and place, juxtaposing Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, John and Yoko in concert with ads for Tupperware – all inspired by the fact that John and Yoko did an awful lot of TV watching in their small New York apartment of that time, with John in particular thrilled by the American novelty of 24/7 television.
It was also on TV that John and Yoko saw a documentary about the scandalous abuse of learning-disabled children at the infamous Willowbrook State School in New York and they organised the One to One concert at Madison Square Garden in 1972 to raise money for the children there. The film also gives us some amazing audio material: tape recordings of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s phone conversations with various journalists and managers, and a hilarious running-gag account of an assistant having to get hundreds of live flies for Ono’s MoMA exhibition.
For me, the most staggering clip is actually nothing to do with Lennon. At a 1972 White House gala to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Reader’s Digest magazine, President Nixon himself introduces the wholesome musical entertainment, The Ray Conniff Singers, whose material he beamingly describes as square – “Because I like it square!” But before this trad combo can go into their rendition of Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me, their Canadian singer Carole Feraci holds up a sign saying “Stop the Killing” and directly addresses Nixon: “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals and vegetation. You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight, you would not dare drop another bomb.” It stunningly echoes the Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon to Donald Trump; Lennon himself never got anywhere near that kind of amazingly direct confrontation.
In some ways, this is like David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s The US vs John Lennon, which covers some of the same ground, but Macdonald’s film is more immersive, more dreamlike. Interestingly and indirectly, it shows a certain something nagging at Lennon: his repeated, failed attempts to get Bob Dylan to join with him in his campaigns. Dylan was evidently wary of getting into Lennon’s orbit. It’s a vivid time capsule.
• One to One: John and Yoko is in Imax cinemas on 9 and 10 April and UK cinemas from 11 April, and Australian cinemas from 3 July.
