"I'm not about to get myself shot. But I'm still an artist, a revolutionary artist." — John Lennon
In the early 1970s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono fled their London-area mansion for New York City's Greenwich Village neighbourhood. Having begun a metamorphosis into revolutionary artists with the release of 1969's "Give Peace a Chance," the pair quickly associated themselves with prominent activists like Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, immersing themselves in the social upheaval of the day.
These activities were high-profile and quickly drew the ire of the Nixon administration, which began sending operatives to follow the Lennons by car and listening in on their phone calls. Suspecting something was amiss, the couple began meticulously recording their calls for record-keeping purposes.
It is largely these recordings that co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards use to tell the story of this chapter in the Lennons's life story in the documentary One to One: John & Yoko. With no shortage of characters calling the Lennons, the film is filled with conversations with John's duplicitous (and later disgraced) manager Allen Klein, legendary session players like Jim Keltner, Beatles associate Iain Macmillan, and the couple's assistant (and John's mistress) May Pang.
These phone recordings tastefully overlay footage of an immaculate Lennon apartment replica, cigarette still burning in the ashtray, or at times, a simple black screen with pop art subtitles. Intercut with these conversational clips, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards use archival footage from the era, whether it be indirectly or directly related to the Lennons. These clips sometimes play on an of-the-era television set in the replica apartment.
Footage of the ill-fated White House gala where choir singer Carole Feraci holds up a sign and tells Nixon to "stop the killing [in Vietnam]" appears alongside briefly shown news reports on the burgeoning Watergate scandal. Clips of the attempted assassination of the defiant segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and the colourful intro to The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour flash before our eyes, while a harrowing reel on Vietnam GIs follows sometime later.
These sequences set the tone for the times the Lennons lived, before plunging the viewer into their activism arc headlong. Numerous archival clips connect directly to the Lennons, whether it be John's appearance with counterculture darling Jerry Rubin on The Mike Douglas Show, the abhorrent conditions at Attica Correctional Facility and the clash between prisoners and corrections officers (which Lennon chronicled on 1972's Some Time in New York City album), or John's speech at a Bryant Park peace rally.
The aforementioned archival clips provide merely an enhancement, where the phone conversations themselves offer an intimate insight into exactly what the couple was up to at that time. We hear multiple exchanges between May Pang and various Lennon associates as she scours New York to find "five hundred to a thousand flies" for Ono's new art film, Fly (an event previously chronicled in The Lost Weekend: A Love Story with more emphasis).
The benefit concerts held at Madison Square Garden in August 1972 to support the kids at Willowbrook State School raised over $1.5 million and serve as a fitting end to the documentary. As Lennon became less politically forward and moved into the more upscale Dakota Building in 1973, his counterculture-centric artistic focus would come to a close shortly thereafter.
While the lack of direct narration in One to One can sometimes feel bare and the multitude of historical clips unrelated to the Lennons borders on extraneous, the film's exclusive reliance on phone recordings and archival footage is refreshing.
Although not a particularly novel approach, Macdonald and Rice-Edward's artistic interweaving of the telephone recordings and clips, and the way in which the filmmakers choose to project them through the apartment, TV set and concert footage, sets One to One apart from the many Lennon documentaries. Combined with the film's overall presentation as a period piece set during a critical stage of Lennon and Ono's career, One to One contains great staying power that makes it a must-watch for any Lennon fan, old or new.