New documentary a 'window through which you can view the lives' of John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Sean Ono Lennon says the upcoming documentary film 'One to One: John Yoko' is "a window through which you can view the lives of my parents" and he dubbed them the "first reality TV couple".
Sean Ono Lennon calls the new documentary movie 'One to One: John Yoko' "a window through which you can view the lives of my parents".
The film has been directed by Kevin McDonald and features footage from the two 'One to One' benefit concerts that John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Elephant’s Memory performed at Madison Square Garden in August 1972.
These concerts were the only full live shows Lennon ever did between the breakup of the Beatles and his death in 1980 but Sean insists that the documentary is about more than music, calling it "multi-layered [with] macro and micro narratives".
He told Variety: "Honestly, I think Kevin is an amazing director and obviously he’s made many great films, so he knows what he’s doing. And his angle on this story is something that I couldn’t have imagined, I guess. Because I probably would’ve imagined ... some people might be imagining, that it would just be a concert film. But really the concert is a window through which you can view the lives of my parents at that time, moving to New York from the U.K., and then through their eyes, you view the greater political and cultural landscape of the early ‘70s. So, like any great film should be, it’s very multi-layered and has macro and micro narratives that are all equally compelling in different ways."
Sean called his parents the "first reality TV couple" because of how they documented and recorded much of their private lives.
He said: "I think it’s really interesting that John and Yoko famously recorded their lives all the time via video — I mean, via 16 millimeter film. You know, they were documenting their lives daily when they were living at Tittenhurst in England [where they lived 1969-71]. And then when they got to New York, they were recording all of their own phone calls, because the FBI had been monitoring them and arguably harassing them, and Nixon was trying to deport my dad from the country.
"And just also the fact that they were doing that in the early ‘70s, before reality television and before social media and before memes — they were already kind of ahead of their time in that regard. As far as I am concerned, it’s like they were the first reality TV celebrity couple. And also they were the first to kind of use memes to spread their own ideas with, for example, “Give peace a chance” or “War is over if you want it” or “Hair Peace” or whatever their slogans were; they’re arguably kind of mimetic campaigns for social issues. So it’s fascinating to see how they were able to use the technology to document and record their private lives while also sort of using that level of intimacy to create media that was important to them — meaning that they wanted to show who they were and the truth of who they were, and they wanted people to see them unmanicured and unfiltered. And I feel like no one was really doing that at the time."
