Review “TWST: Things We Said Today”: experimental documentary on the Beatles

You could look at Andrei Ujica's TWST: Things we said todaya new documentary about the Beatles' iconic August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and returns frustrated that the actual August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium is not, in fact, featured on screen.

It could.

TWST: Things we said today

The bottom line

Touching nostalgia for the future.

Places: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition); New York Film Festival (Spotlight)
Director: Andrej Ujica

1 hour and 25 minutes

Hence my warning to you, because it would be a sad thing indeed if this lovely, enlightening, complexly experiential (and experimental) image were to disappoint anyone.

TWST is set up as a concert film, but is instead a combination of two nonfiction categories—the tone poem and the city symphony—that are used as fallback general classifications for critics and scholars. Ujica fuses them with archival rigor and effective imagination to create a film that is dreamy and clear at the same time.

Fans of the Fab Four know this, of course The Beatles at Shea Stadium it's already something that exists, or at least used to exist, even if it has been mired in various rights disputes for years.

This documentary is mostly in line with the temporal disconnects of the titular song written by Paul McCartney – which is not heard here, but which McCartney called “nostalgia for the future”.

TWST begins on August 13, 1965, when the Beatles arrive in New York City. They're the biggest band in the world, but much of the talk from local journalists – here interviewing fans, peppering the quartet with questions at press conferences and offering commentary across multiple mediums – concerns the possibility that the Beatles may already have been usurped. from other bands. For screaming fans, John, Paul, George and Ringo couldn't be more representative of the present. For cynical journalists, they represent the past (or perhaps those journalists are already stuck in the past). And as spectators, we exist in a ghostly middle ground between future, past and present.

We float on grainy, beautiful, black-and-white footage culled from countless hours of news segments and home movies, often layered for added authenticity with radio coverage anticipating the big day. The moment we are experiencing is real and immediate, but Ujica never lets us forget that this is a film, that realism is an aesthetic choice and that a narrator can take or abandon it in an instant. (TWST would make a strange/funny double figure with the Romanian director's 1996 film Out of the presenta VERY different portrait of physical and temporal disconnections.)

Bear with me, because this is about to get a little dizzying: We're accompanied throughout the day by several guides, including Geoffrey O'Brien, the teenage reporter son of a legendary New York DJ, and Judith Kristen, an enthusiastic teenage clubber. concerts. Kristen's words, voiced by Therese Azzara, come from her diary; O'Brien's, played by Tommy McCabe, gives what the press calls a “self-narrative account.” Both are intertwined with fragments of Ujica's fictional tale, “Isabela, the Butterfly Friend.”

So we hear actors reciting words that are real, except when they're not. The characters are visualized by artist Yann Kebbi as rough, shaky drawings overlaid on documentary images to lead us around the city. Geoffrey takes multiple cabs, traversing the bumpy streets of Harlem and the Fulton Fish Market before dawn. As it gets closer and closer to the show, it simultaneously takes us further and further away from our conventional expectations of this film. Geoffrey's journey eventually intersects in spirit with Judith's, which includes picking up several friends and taking a long detour to the World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows that year.

If you're familiar with the concept of the World's Fair (older readers say “Duh!” and younger readers say “Huh?”), you'll know that the exposition celebrated the achievements of the past and predicted the achievements of the future. See how it goes? One can only imagine Ujica's delight in realizing that these two major events were occurring within a few meters of each other.

Combinations like these are very important for Ujica. Safe, TWST is about a Beatles concert, but the soundtrack is populated entirely by other songs that were hits of the time, filtered through the radio or through background “noise”: passing cars, open windows and the like. Some of them, like Shirley Ellis's “The Name Game,” don't seem as substantial in our cultural memory today. Some of them, like James Brown's “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag,” are equally substantial, but in a way that seems parallel to the Beatles-centric narrative rather than directly connected. And some of them represent an intersection, like the opening tune, Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven,” which the Beatles famously covered (but didn't play Shea Stadium).

And sure, we like to remember the “riots” caused by Beatlemania, the images of breathless devotees breaking barriers and passing out in the suburbs – but how often do we make the connection with the fact that Watts' Rebellion was happening at that very moment in the whole country? ? How often are we forced to grapple with the stark differences between the benevolent paternalism of police responses to one “riot” and the instigating and exacerbating hostility of police responses to the other “riot”?

Maybe people at the time didn't necessarily make these connections, and maybe our guides were too young and innocent to make them. But Ujica lays it out here intelligently and without sacrificing momentum as we move towards an ending that is beautiful and satisfying. Even if it denies us what we thought we'd wait 85 minutes to see.

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