Documentary "One to One: John & Yoko" in cinemas | John & Yoko: They lived, loved, and died

When Yoko Ono and John Lennon were asked by a journalist in 1973 how posterity should remember them, Yoko replied that she would prefer it to be said: "They lived, loved, and died." And John added: "Simply as two lovers. We would like to be scattered across the Atlantic and Pacific. Ash particles over New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. That would be beautiful. The final sign of our rebellion against the establishment is to scatter ourselves everywhere, over the White House, Buckingham Palace, and the Emperor's Temple."

At 33, Lennon no longer wanted to be seen as the catchy pop-song-belting Beatle he became famous for. He had no interest in "reviving the past" but wanted to be himself, he says in one scene in this film. He and Yoko intended to work for a better, freer, more just world. Ever since they moved from England to New York in 1971, they had seen themselves as social activists, as members of the growing counterculture in the USA. Feminism, pacifism, the protests against the reactionary President Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, the anti-racist civil rights movement, art, the Yippies, and the hippies: all of this was supposed to come together and unite into a "revolutionary movement," according to the idea at the time. However, Yoko and John also often sat or lay around at home in their small apartment and watched television for hours. Lennon says that the television at the foot of the bed replaces “the fireplace of my childhood.”

Kevin Macdonald's documentary "One to One: John & Yoko" not only tells the story of the artist couple Ono and Lennon in New York's bohemian Greenwich Village in the early 1970s, but above all of the political and social struggles of that time, which also included the "One to One" benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, Lennon's only full-length solo performance after the end of the Beatles. The concert, which benefited disabled children and adults who had been neglected in a long-term institutional setting, took place on August 30, 1972.

The unconventional film takes us back to this era in the form of a fast-paced collage of video clips from archive material, in which on the one hand there were the Nixon "rednecks" and on the other the aforementioned patchwork of minorities striving for emancipation: We see TV news images and hear excerpts from recorded telephone conversations; excerpts from advertisements are juxtaposed with short scenes from controversial TV interviews; private recordings from John and Yoko's apartment are combined with TV images of anti-war demonstrations and anti-racism protests.

There's no voiceover that teaches or contextualizes the images. Nothing is explained; characters are introduced, if at all, only briefly by their names. Rather, what is shown is intended to explain itself: John and Yoko with accompanying musicians on stage, singing and shouting "Stop The War!" / Nixon shaking hands on a state visit to China / a clip from a US television game show, a laughing blonde / news images from Vietnam showing falling bombs, burning huts, crying children and US soldiers / John and Yoko at the "first international feminist conference", where a vote is about to be held on whether men should be allowed to attend / a US television reporter stands in front of the maximum security prison Attica in 1971 and reports on the violent suppression of the prisoners' revolt that has just taken place there: "People are dying in here right now" / a clip from a commercial shows a happy housewife in her kitchen, preparing a roast / hippies shout "Viva la Revolucion!" / Nixon grinning during the election campaign, holding a child in his arms and waving / Yoko Ono at the opening of an exhibition of her Artworks in a New York gallery / the pleasantly cheeky and brash peace activist and anarchist Jerry Rubin, who insults the interrupting interviewer during a TV interview as an intolerant "television plastic person" / an excerpt from a telephone conversation with John Lennon, who says he is not surprised that his telephone is being tapped: "There seems to be an astonishing number of repairs going on down in the basement, every day."

Every few seconds a new scene follows, and we see a rapid succession of new images, filmed at the time by private Super-8 cameras or broadcast on television. They document a bygone era – the time of Nixon's presidency, when the USA was a nation extremely divided politically. But the images do not end there. The way they are arranged and edited also comment, in their own way, on the sometimes merciless and tough culture war in the USA at the beginning of the 1970s: on the one hand, civil disobedience, political protest, conscientious objectors, feminists, advocates of sexual liberation; on the other, the "sick system," the lying, bigoted, culturally conservative "white, Christian-Protestant, capitalist society," as Jerry Rubin calls it.

Anyone with only limited historical knowledge of the political and cultural developments in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, and no memorized index of characters, will find it difficult to follow the narrative and will feel abandoned by the filmmakers. One sees long beards, long, colorful robes, and extravagant glasses. But too much historical knowledge is sometimes assumed of the viewer. Several people appear here who may not be remembered by everyone: Some may still recognize the poet Allen Ginsberg, champion of gay emancipation and an imposing leader of the Beat Generation, one of the era's better-known protagonists. In the film, he is seen standing next to Ono, reciting a memorable poem whose verses mainly deal with the inability of various personalities (judges, politicians, central bank presidents) to adequately maintain personal hygiene: "Most have smelly, wet backsides / That are unfit for lovemaking / Soiled underwear that sticks / And all are at war / Very few can relax their anal sphincters."

But who remembers Jerry Rubin? Political activist Abbie Hoffman? John Sinclair, the former manager of the proto-punk band MC5? The racist former US governor George Wallace? Or perhaps the most bizarre historical figure, who appears several times in this documentary: political activist Alan J. Weberman, who spent years stalking folk singer Bob Dylan, accusing him of defecting to the "enemy." In one memorable scene in the film, he can be seen rummaging through Dylan's trash can, holding the items he uncovered up to the camera of the journalist accompanying him, and commenting on them.

But as I said: in the incessant stream of images that the film provides us on the one hand, but which it refuses to explain and classify on the other, it is left to the viewer to find his way.

"One to One: John & Yoko," UK 2024. Directed by Kevin Macdonald. 101 min. Release: June 26.