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.
