Documentary »One To One: John & Yoko« in the cinema – John & Yoko: They lived, loved and died

When Yoko Ono and John Lennon were asked by a journalist in 1973, in the way the posterity should remember, Yoko replies, preferred to say: “They lived, loved and died.” And John adds: “Simply two lovers. We would like to be scattered over the Atlantic and Pacific. Ash particles over New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. That would be nice. The last sign of our uprising against the establishment is to scatter ourselves everywhere, above the White House, the Buckingham Palace and the emperor’s temple. «

At the age of 33, Lennon no longer wants to understand himself as the catchy pop songs of smashing Beatle that he became famous. He has no interest in “reviving the past”, but now he wants to be himself, he says in a scene of this film. He and Yoko intend to get involved in a better, freer, more fairer world. At the latest since moving from England to New York in 1971, they see themselves as social activists, as members of the growing counterculture in the United States. Feminism, pacifism, the protests against the reactionary president Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, the anti-racist civil rights movement, the art, the Yippies and the hippies: all of this should come together and combine to form a “revolutionary movement,” at the time. However, Yoko and John are often lying around at home in their little apartment and seeing far away for hours. The television at the foot of the bed, says Lennon, replaces him “the fireplace fire of my childhood”.

Kevin MacDonald’s documentary “One To One: John & Yoko” tells not only about the life of the artist couple ono/Lennon in the New York Boheme district of Greenwich Village in the early 1970s, but above all about the political and social struggles of this time, in which the “One To One” beefic concert in Madison Square falls, the only one Lennon’s full-length solo appearance after the end of the Beatles. The concert, which was given in favor of disabled children and adults who had been kept in a home for a long time, took place on August 30, 1972.

The unconventional film leads us back into this era in the form of a rapid video muscle collage from archive material, in which the Nixon “Redneck” stood on the one hand and on the other the patchwork of the minorities who are already mentioned after emancipation: We see TV news pictures and listen to excerpts from the phone calls cut; In addition to short scenes from controversial television interviews, there are excerpt from advertising spots; Private recordings from John and Yoko’s apartment are combined with television pictures of anti-war demonstrations and anti-racism protests.

A instructive or the pictures classified the off-comment is dispensed with. Nothing is explained, if at all, people are only presented with a short name. Rather, what is shown should explain to themselves: John and Yoko with accompanying musicians on stage, singing and »Stop the War« calling / shaking Nixon on a state visit to China / a section of a games show from US television, a laughing blonde / news pictures from Vietnam, the falling bombs, burning children and US soldiers / John and Yoko “First international feminist conference”, on which it should be coordinated, whether men can be present / a US remote reporter stands in front of the Attica high security prison in 1971 and reports on the violent reflection of the prisoner revolts that has just been held there: “In particular, people / a section of a commercial in her kitchen shows a roast / roasting a roast / Hippies call “Viva la Revolucion” / the grinning Nixon in the election campaign, hold a child on their arms and waving / Yoko Ono when opening an exhibition of their works of art in a gallery in New York / The peace activist and anarchist Jerry Rubin, who is pleasantly or wet research, who is interrupted by the TV interview as an intolerant “Television plastic person” insulted / an extract from a phone call from John Lennon, who reports that he is not surprised that his telephone is listened to: “There seem to be a surprising number of repairs down there in the basement.”

A new scene follows every few seconds, we see new pictures in high bars that were filmed by private Super 8 cameras at the time or broadcast on television. They document a lost era – the time of the Presidency of Nixon when the United States was a politically extremely split nation. But the pictures are not exhausted in it. In the way in which they are arranged and assembled, they also comment in their way to the sometimes merciless and with hard bandages in the USA of the early 1970s: On the one hand, on the one hand, civil disobedience, political protest, war service refusal, feminists, supporters of sexual liberation, on the other “White, Christian-Protestant, capitalist society,” as Jerry Rubin calls it.

If you only have limited historical knowledge of the political-cultural development of the 60s and 1970s in the United States and no passenger register in your head, you will not always be able to follow the told and feel left alone by the filmmakers. You look at long beards, long colorful robes and extravagant glasses. But too much historical knowledge is sometimes required by the viewer. A number of people appear here who should no longer be remembered: the poet Allen Ginsberg, writer for homosexual emancipation and impressive leading figure of the Beat Generation, one of the more well -known protagonists of the era, may still recognize one or the other. In the film, standing in addition to Ono, you can see a memorable poem, in which verses are mainly about the inability of different personalities (judges, politicians, central bank presidents), in sufficient ways: “Most have stinky, moist rear parts / which are unsuitable for lovemaking / polluted underwear that sticks / and everyone can relax.”

But who still knows Jerry Rubin? The political activist Abbie Hoffman? John Sinclair, the former manager of the protopunk band MC5? The racist former US governor George Wallace? Or even the possibly the most bizarre historical person who appears several times in this documentary: political activist Alan J. Weerman, who has stabbed the folk singer Bob Dylan for years, to whom he accused him of being over. In a memorable scene of the film you can look at him how he ransacked Dylan’s trash can and the things he promotes in the camera of the journalist accompanying him and comments.

But as I said: In the incessant current of the images that the film delivers to us on the one hand, the explanation and sorting of which he refuses on the other hand, it is left to the viewer to find his way around.

“One to one: John & Yoko”, Great Britain 2024. Director: Kevin Macdonald. 101 min.