06/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Romanian documentary great Andrei Ujicâ takes us back to summer 1965 in New York, as The Beatles played Shea Stadium whilst the rest of the city prepared for change

A famous remark of Sean Connery’s James Bond in Goldfinger is a description of something “that’s just as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs”. Given their enduring adulation today, it’s hard to imagine that The Beatles, Liverpool’s greatest sons, were regarded with scepticism in their early bloom by the chattering classes and others: whether for the more facile quality of their first singles or their association with early-1960s youth culture. Beatlemania, backed by its iconic chorus of screaming young female fans, was really a place where no adults were allowed or were especially inclined to go.

Andrei Ujicâ, a godfather of the Romanian New Wave and a pioneer of experimental found-footage films, has chosen this cultural moment to memorialise in TWST - Things We Said Today, named for a memorable deep cut on the group’s 1964 LP A Hard Day’s Night. Running at just 85 minutes, when his previous works like Videograms of a Revolution and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu [+see also:
trailer
film profile] were more substantial, Ujicâ – hailing who he describes as “the greatest band of all time” – doesn’t add much provocative discourse to this well-documented subject, but his distilling of variegated found footage and literary sources concerning the band’s Shea Stadium concert, taking place in August 1965, alights on something dreamy, resonant and affecting. The film premiered this week, out of competition, at the Venice Film Festival.

Whilst the black-and-white 16 mm scraps from US news broadcasters and the 8 mm colour home-video footage conform to this era’s retrospective image, its narrative framing devices are more novel and eccentric. Although a French-Romanian production, there are several New York-based executive producers listed on the film, such as Kent Jones (a major film maven of the city), and observations are brought forth from two witnesses of the day, essayist and poet Geoffrey O’Brien (the voice of Tommy McCabe), and author Judith Kristen (the voice of Therese Azzara), whose reminiscences on the era are repurposed to sit atop the images.

If it can’t help us further understand the United States of 1965, Ujicâ and his editor Dana Bunescu’s work sensorily summons the era’s hopeful aura: it’s weathered a bit, like John, Paul, George and Ringo’s hair on the cover of Beatles for Sale, and not yet under the sway of the counterculture. It’s tensing its stomach for the further splendour, discord and upheaval to follow in years to come. Not for nothing is the 1965 World’s Fair in Queens heavily featured in its final section. The array of sequences in this film are a bit like touring that event’s many pavilions: you poke your head inside for a few minutes, then your attention turns elsewhere, your mind feeling light on the overstimulation of it all.

Amidst ephemera commonplace from many “city symphony” non-fiction films – nocturnal glimpses of iconic landmarks (here, Times Square), leisure time on the beach, public transport efficiently whisking its citizens away – The Beatles’ shenanigans in the big city are juxtaposed against the concurrent Watts riots unfolding in Los Angeles (an uprising from the black community against police violence), with O’Brien’s words then awkwardly mentioning Harlem as a similar place of unrest. O’Brien and Kristen bespeak a kind of guileless innocence – the chief manner in which TWST conveys the spirit of 1965, after which even the Fab Four couldn’t help being gripped by the political tide.

TWST - Things We Said Today is a co-production by France and Romania, staged by Les Films du Camélia, Modern Electric Pictures and Tangaj Production. Its world sales are handled by Minerva Pictures.