The US versus John Lennon
Jan. 13th, 2007 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe first film of the new year - and my first film at the Tyneside Cinema in Exile was The US versus John Lennon. It was strange to see the familiar Tyneside Cinema furniture in the new setting of Gateshead's old Town Hall - and come to think of it, it was an appropriate film to see there, the sort of left-wing documentary I'm accustomed to seeing in municipal halls.
Except that it isn't really a political film at all. For some reason I was expecting a polemic constructed around John Lennon's FBI dossier, but what I got was a collection of film clips and talking heads. Clearly they had the dossier - it appeared as wallpaper behind some of the talking heads - but they weren't about to do anything so unvisual as read from it.
The focus was on Lennon as an artist - the impression it gave was that he was entirely sincere in his peace activism, but that what he really found rewarding was the scope this gave him for devising happenings, ways of stating and publicising his views. Some of the hostile speakers described him as being used by the political operators, by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, but it didn't look like that: the film showed Lennon refusing to be manoeuvred into travelling to the Republican convention for the voter registration campaign, for example. I got the impression that politics was the medium in which Lennon had chosen to work, rather than his natural mode of thought.
This impression was strengthened by the film's tightness of focus: Lennon was centre screen all the time, there was no context, no other voice. This is understandable, but at times extreme. Although the main body of the film is concerned with the post-Beatles era, it does sketch in the outline of Lennon's biography before and after, yet the Beatles are barely mentioned: they appear in a press conference, illustrating the earlier "US versus Lennon" episode of reaction against John Lennon's remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now", but you wouldn't know from this film that Lennon's greatest artistic creations had been made as one among equals within the group.
Inevitably, this absence contrasts with the definite presence in the film of Yoko Ono . I was told that not only did she cooperate with the film-makers, she also helped to fund the film. I don't know if this was true, but it is certainly consistent with the view of Lennon as someone whose true artistic greatness was unleashed by his collaboration with Yoko Ono. This could have been irritating, but I found it rather endearing: all the footage of John and Yoko happily in bed holding court with the press, John at his sweetest, never the sharp-tongued bruiser, beaming at his new wife (and didn't she look young?), John in unexpected knitwear...
It was a pleasure to see him again. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, but I saw footage I had not previously seen.
Except that it isn't really a political film at all. For some reason I was expecting a polemic constructed around John Lennon's FBI dossier, but what I got was a collection of film clips and talking heads. Clearly they had the dossier - it appeared as wallpaper behind some of the talking heads - but they weren't about to do anything so unvisual as read from it.
The focus was on Lennon as an artist - the impression it gave was that he was entirely sincere in his peace activism, but that what he really found rewarding was the scope this gave him for devising happenings, ways of stating and publicising his views. Some of the hostile speakers described him as being used by the political operators, by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, but it didn't look like that: the film showed Lennon refusing to be manoeuvred into travelling to the Republican convention for the voter registration campaign, for example. I got the impression that politics was the medium in which Lennon had chosen to work, rather than his natural mode of thought.
This impression was strengthened by the film's tightness of focus: Lennon was centre screen all the time, there was no context, no other voice. This is understandable, but at times extreme. Although the main body of the film is concerned with the post-Beatles era, it does sketch in the outline of Lennon's biography before and after, yet the Beatles are barely mentioned: they appear in a press conference, illustrating the earlier "US versus Lennon" episode of reaction against John Lennon's remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now", but you wouldn't know from this film that Lennon's greatest artistic creations had been made as one among equals within the group.
Inevitably, this absence contrasts with the definite presence in the film of Yoko Ono . I was told that not only did she cooperate with the film-makers, she also helped to fund the film. I don't know if this was true, but it is certainly consistent with the view of Lennon as someone whose true artistic greatness was unleashed by his collaboration with Yoko Ono. This could have been irritating, but I found it rather endearing: all the footage of John and Yoko happily in bed holding court with the press, John at his sweetest, never the sharp-tongued bruiser, beaming at his new wife (and didn't she look young?), John in unexpected knitwear...
It was a pleasure to see him again. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, but I saw footage I had not previously seen.
