A new documentary film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono features rare footage of The Beatles legend in Syracuse.
“One to One: John & Yoko” premiered earlier this month on HBO, focusing on the couple’s life in the early 1970s. Highlights include an intimate look at their life in a Greenwich Village apartment in New York, social activism amid the Vietnam War, and restored video of their “One to One” benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, Lennon’s only full-length show after leaving the Beatles.
But some of the never-before-seen material also includes scenes of Lennon and Ono at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. The “unfinished” exhibition, Ono’s first solo museum show, opened on Oct. 8, 1971.
“It will be unfinished always because every piece in this exhibition is also growing because people add things to it,” Ono says.
The doc shows the large crowd of more than 6,000 that gathered at the Everson for a glimpse of Lennon and Ono. At one point, the couple is seen having a private meal at a table in the lobby of the museum while fans look on from the balcony.
This 1971 file photo shows Yoko Ono, right, and her husband John Lennon putting the finishing touches on her show, “This is Not Here…An Exhibit of Conceptual Works of Art,” at the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse, N.Y. (Bettmann Archive | Getty Images)Bettmann Archive
Fans can also see some of Ono’s exhibit, including a partially eaten apple starting to rot, a boy hammering a piece of metal, empty picture frames, and a girl who bumps into a wall inside a glass maze. Famed beat poet Allen Ginsberg even reads a poem (“…only U.S. honkies smear feces twixt their buttocks with clean paper…“) as a ”sculpture” by Ginsberg and Ono.
“One to One: John & Yoko,” directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald, premiered Nov. 14 on HBO and is currently streaming on HBO Max. The scenes from Syracuse’s Everson Museum are shown between the 17:50 and 20:12 marks.
Macdonald includes footage of car commercials, news reports, phone calls and television broadcasts to simulate the changing of TV channels, according to IndieWire. It simulates the way Lennon and Ono learned about America at the time by extensively watching TV, as well as adds context to songs performed by Lennon, Ono and The Elephant’s Memory Band during the “One to One” concert.
“It’s been very interesting – people in their teens and early 20s who’ve watched the film totally get it in a way, because it is the sort of TikTok wave of experience of the world. And they’re inspired by the ‘Let’s get out there and change the world’ sort of simplicity of John and Yoko’s message, but also, they don’t care if they don’t know who everyone is. They’re picking it up as they go, and I think that’s a fun kind of experience,” Macdonald told IndieWire.
Executive producers include Brad Pitt and the couple’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, who newly remixed the music for the documentary. Sean Lennon said he thinks the concert footage will also show audiences his mother’s singing talent in a way that she’s not given credit for.
“I don’t blame people for not appreciating a certain style of my mother’s more experimental vocalizations,” he told NPR. But what I think is unfortunate about it is that that kind of avant garde, you know, howling, as it were, really overshadows the fact that she does have very beautiful conventional songs as well… And almost no one has heard those because they don’t get the attention. But she sings and writes beautifully, I think, and she has many facets to her, you know, musical vocabulary.”
This 1971 file photo shows Yoko Ono, left, and her husband John Lennon celebrating his 31st birthday before the opening of her art exhibit at the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse, N.Y. (Bettmann Archive | Getty Images)Bettmann Archive
Ono, who now lives on an Upstate New York farm she bought with Lennon, married the Beatles singer in 1969 and had one child together, Sean. Her 1971 art exhibit in Syracuse drew thousands of visitors, including celebrities like Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and actor Dennis Hopper.
Lennon, who was killed by Mark David Chapman in 1980, is widely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters in music history. As a solo artist, his hits included “Imagine,” “Woman,” “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” “Jealous Guy” and “Happy Xmas (War is Over).”
Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were also internationally famous as The Beatles with hits like “Let It Be,” “In My Life,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Come Together,” “Help!” and “All You Need is Love.” The Fab Four broke up in 1970, but their music remains popular today with streaming services, influence on other artists, documentaries (like “The Beatles Anthology” and Peter Jackson’s “Get Back”) and multiple Beatles-inspired stories (including the 2007 movie “Across the Universe,” Netflix’s animated kids’ show “The Beat Bugs,” Cirque du Soleil’s “Love,” Danny Boyle’s 2019 film “Yesterday” and four upcoming biopics about John, Paul, George and Ringo).
See a trailer for “One to One: John & Yoko”: