As he commented to Variety Magazine last year: “When I finished filming it at the end of January 1969, the Beatles had not broken up. ![]() That 1964 Ed Sullivan Show footage said, “Let me introduce to you,” whereas Jackson’s Get Back (the intended title of the album they were trying to make) seems to say, “They’re still guaranteed to raise a smile.” Lindsay-Hogg is thrilled that someone of Jackson’s stature re-cut and fashioned a new version of landmark material that he didn’t have to heart to re-approach. The band’s estate, however, seems more comfortable with simply letting it be as it was, while the two remaining group members allow themselves the pleasure of experiencing Jackson’s evocation of a seminal moment in their band’s very existence, a period almost as important historically in its own way as their first appearance performing on American television. To this day Lindsay-Hogg, who is reportedly very pleased with what Jackson did with his original footage, is still hoping that Apple Corps makes good on a promise they made to him some forty years ago to re-release in some form what for him is his frequently misunderstood original. Jackson’s is a uniquely retrospective artifact that injects considerably more humanity, joy, brotherly love and self-awareness into the stream of seemingly endless rehearsing, some of which amounted to actual musical composition on the spot. ![]() While Lindsay-Hogg’s more compact and almost claustrophobically sad auto-elegy artifact was an act of prophetic forecasting, since the band had yet to officially disband and go their separate ways, Jackson’s somewhat loftier take on his subject has the advantage of containing a truly mythical and almost operatic aspect of unintended auto-nostalgia. Both films respectfully explore a kind of living pop culture monument while it was shakily undergoing seismic shifts and creative convulsions, and both are strongly elegiac, but each for different reasons and by using different methods. Both focus on the same remarkable moments in the band’s shared struggles to maintain some semblance of creative togetherness while in the midst of personal and professional turmoil. That historic 1969-1970 period of the Beatles’ legendary, short but intense eight-year-long lifespan as a working group, is intimately examined in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary Let It Be about the recording of the album of the same name and now more fully in Jackson’s seven-and-a-half-hour magnum opus, carefully crafted from sixty hours of Lindsay-Hogg’s footage. Luckily for us however, Peter Jackson’s masterfully edited documentary called Get Back at least contributes somewhat to their rehabilitation at celebrities anonymous. To some extent, this might just be the occupational hazard of any huge cultural icon, but it could also be a revealing indication of how much we all want to believe what we want to believe, despite what the facts and evidence may show us otherwise. Not just the fact that they shared an intimate partnership with a famous musician and pop star but also the fact that they have often been collaterally damaged victims of an ongoing mythology about who they actually were and what they actually did. ![]() To think of Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney in the same sentence, let alone in the same artfully appreciative article, might strike some people as a surprising proposition, and yet as a narrative ballad they share much more in common that you might at first imagine.
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