The Beatles Effect

Andrei Ujică’s new film takes its title from a Beatles song that Paul McCartney once said was meant to evoke “a future nostalgia.” Similarly paradoxical, TWST/Things We Said Today is a concert documentary that barely shows the concert it commemorates. It treats the Beatles’ August 1965 appearance at Shea Stadium in Queens—the biggest live concert of the group’s career—as both a world-historical event and a structuring absence. A documentary of the concert exists, mainly in bootleg form, but Ujică’s subject is less the Beatles than what might be termed the Beatles effect.

Born in Romania in 1951 and now based in Germany, Ujică is one of the century’s great film-essayists. As a chronicler of history, he has long been fascinated by the interplay of spectatorship and participation. His best known work is The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (2010), a three-hour found-footage assemblage reproducing the Romanian dictator’s official reality—that is, “reality” as it was staged on camera for or by Ceauşescu himself. Videograms of a Revolution (1992), made in collaboration with the influential German political film-artist Harun Farocki, used amateur footage, newsreels, and TV reportage to document the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. It might have been titled after the venerable American educational TV series You Are There. Its follow-up, Out of the Present (1995), could have been called You Are Not: that film was a portrait of the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who, circling the globe during a ten-month residence at the space station Mir, missed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

TWST, for which Ujică spent a dozen years gathering archival footage, harks back to an earlier historical turning point. For Americans, the year that brought the Beatles back to New York was a hinge. Malcolm X was assassinated in February. The following month, Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Selma to Montgomery marches and President Lyndon Johnson delivered his “We Shall Overcome” speech. In April the US invaded the Dominican Republic; in May Berkeley hosted a widely publicized two-day protest against the Vietnam War. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August and escalated the war. The euphoria of 1964, induced in part by the Beatles’ first visit to America, had dissipated. By the end of the summer Barry McGuire’s rendition of the apocalyptic folk-rock ballad “Eve of Destruction” had gone to number one.

In TWST the Beatles arrive in New York as celestial emissaries, floating above the tumult they create. From the moment they deplane at Kennedy airport, their presence—less apparent as TWST progresses—sends a ripple of excitement throughout the city. Kids have staked out the aircraft. Cops are confounded by and cannot contain the horde of adolescent girls who block Sixth Avenue in front of the thirty-six-story Warwick Hotel, a classy establishment built by William Randolph Hearst in 1926 as Marion Davis’s New York pied-à-terre, where the Beatles will spend the weekend.

Inside, a chaotic press conference reveals nothing more than the group’s poise and John Lennon’s cheerful insolence. Asked by a reporter what he doesn’t like about New York, he replies “You,” like a shot, then adds, “Just kidding.” Several questions allude to the group’s fading popularity. To some degree it had waned. Having erupted in Britain in 1963, the Beatles were approaching the end of the traditional three-year celebrity arc. (They would, however, enjoy a second one with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band two years later.) The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” topped the pop charts for a month during the summer of 1965, and one sees a few Stones partisans wielding signs in the crowd outside the Warwick. But the Beatles were still the zeitgeist made material. They were famous for their fame and securely established in pop history. Interviewed by TV newsmen, the fans cite their mothers’ teenage adoration of Frank Sinatra; their chant—“We love you Beatles!”—adapts a song from the recently filmed Bye Bye Birdie, based on a musical making fun of the Elvis phenomena.

Having descended from the sky, the Beatles colonize the air. Fortunately, Ujică lacked the wherewithal to license any of their songs. Thus, the band’s members are heard only at their press conference and performing a radio promo for the AM station WMCA, which had secured the rights to promote the concert. Radio, recently characterized by Marshall McLuhan as a tribal drum, is central. Ujică begins with footage shot aboard one of the offshore “pirate radio” ships that were crucial to the spread of British pop; he integrates copious soundbites of hyperexcited New York AM radio personalities talking up the Beatles—messages typically juxtaposed with overhead views of cars jamming the Long Island Expressway.

Rather than the Beatles, TWST takes as its protagonists two then-seventeen-year-old memoirists, the poet and critic Geoffrey O’Brien and the writer Judith Kristen. Sketchy images of them, drawn by the French illustrator Yann Kebbi, appear as well, intermittently superimposed over documentary footage—wistful phantoms haunting the past. Initially jarring, the strategy gives TWST an odd children’s book feel, accentuated by excerpts from a story, “Isabella, Friend of the Butterflies,” which Ujică wrote when he was a teenager and, as he told the audience at the New York Film Festival, under the spell of the Beatles’ White Album.

That Geoffrey—whose own thoughts on the Beatles appeared in these pages in 2001—is the son of WMCA’s morning disc jockey Joe O’Brien gives Ujică a narrative hook. The younger O’Brien, who was not actually in New York that summer, provides an autofictional account of the weekend. In TWST he uses a press badge organized by his father to attend the Warwick Hotel press conference, asks the Beatles the only half-interesting question (what other British groups they admire), then spends the rest of the day wandering the city (Times Square, Central Park) and its environs (Jones Beach) reflecting on the Beatles and his father’s show.

In great measure Ujică’s subject is New York City, yet much of his film’s power derives from TV footage of the Watts Rebellion, which was underway even as the Beatles played Shea. Almost as breaking news, Ujică interrupts Geoffrey’s peregrinations with a televised news feed from chaotic L.A.—journalists crouched by flaming cars, domestic combat reporters on the frontline of urban disorder—and then continues with a stroll through Harlem, the neighborhood John Lennon specified when asked, at the press conference, what in New York he most wanted to see.

The Harlem footage, much of it taken from a French television report, is sensational. Street scenes alternate with raucous clubs; a handsome, nattily dressed Black man gives an interview in flawless French dissecting police racism. Ujică then returns briefly to Watts, now occupied territory. A white reporter who suggests that Harlem seems like a worse environment than Watts is being educated by a Black resident with regard to race relations in Los Angeles (and America) when, dressed in full combat gear, a white soldier likely younger than any of the Beatles saunters on frame and tells them to “break this up.” Can one imagine a New York cop saying as much to the girls besieging the Warwick?

The second half of TWST follows Kristen from a leafy Philadelphia suburb through New Jersey and out to Queens, her diary illustrated by 8mm home movies that Ujică and his research assistant found on eBay. The longest sequence illustrates Judith and two friends at the New York World’s Fair, then in its final months, adjacent to Shea Stadium—a fairytale realm that, like the Beatles, somehow descended on New York. The girls talk about Michelangelo’s Pietà, another sacred object transported to the city for the Fair, and amuse themselves by imagining that the Beatles are also touring the grounds, like princes in disguise.

A German news reporter planted on the bridge between the Fair and Shea heralds the concert. Shots of homemade banners. Silent images of excited girls. An aerial view is animated so that a host of the butterflies we’ve heard so much about swirl out of the stadium. But then for a moment TWST sheds its cloak of innocence: the sound returns with a shock cut to the sweaty, hysterical chanting mob outside. At that point I could not help but nudge my companion and say “I was there”—meaning there in the Shea Stadium parking lot.

I was sixteen in August 1965, a Queens kid living in my parent’s apartment, working my first summer job as an assistant ward-clerk in a grim municipal hospital, taking the subway to see movies at the Museum of Modern Art, and smoking pot in Alley Pond Park. For me, the song of the summer was the Four Tops’s “Can’t Help Myself,” at once relentless, plaintive, and exultant, wafting in the air around Queens General.

Like everyone, I liked the Beatles, although not as much as I liked the Rolling Stones. So far as I was concerned, the big event that summer, three days after the Beatles played Shea, was electric Bob Dylan at Forest Hill Tennis Stadium. But returning to the tattered spiral notebook I kept then—always a mixed blessing—I see that while I noted Dylan, I had much more to say about what I then called “the most surrealist event of the year.”

My teenage impressions support Ujică’s sense that the Beatles transfixed the city’s mainly white, largely female adolescents and made Queens, if only for a weekend, seem like the center of the universe. I had forgotten that, having gone to MoMA the day before, I saw “millions of cops & kids” around the corner in front of the Warwick. “Girls were screaming,” I wrote, even some “beautiful hip-looking” long-haired Village types. O’Brien writes about such girls in “The Paradise of Bourgeois Teenagers,” a chapter from his memoir Dream Time. His avatar in TWST observes ruefully that the Warwick excitement would have been a great opportunity to meet girls but that there was “an army of them,” all with a negligible interest in non-Beatles.

Having been entranced by that “really groovy scene,” there was no way that I wouldn’t have found myself at Shea—easily reached from my home via the Q17 bus and a single stop on the 7 train. Thus, the following night, I stood outside the stadium with my friend McCarthy and three acquaintances hipper than myself when Shea exploded with a barrage of popping flash bulbs and an unceasing oceanic roar. Inside, the 50,000 spectators seemed to be experiencing a mass orgasm. Outside, I wrote, the crowd “went mad.” Some girls were “scaling the wall.”

Cops were even more evident after the concert: “I was at the exit when the Beatles boarded their armored car. Crowds swept through the police lines. McCarthy and I were carried helpless toward the truck.” I had recently reread The Day of the Locust—Nathanael West was then my favorite writer—and now I got to live it. I caught a glimpse of George, surprisingly expressionless, staring out of a back seat window as the car careened past. “The crowd began to chase the truck through the parking lot. Girls were crying. We went inside.” The summer air was heavy with a pungent aroma, at once sharp and sultry. “We found more girls crying, even still screaming.”

How many of these young people outside the Warwick or inside Shea would three years later occupy buildings at Columbia or battle the police in Chicago? Perhaps a few, maybe even none. But such behavior seems implicit. The libidinal energy Ujică found in front of the Warwick—and, dialectically, the fury documented on the streets of Watts—attest to what in writing The Global Imagination of 1968 (2018) the social theorist George Katsiaficas called the Eros Effect: “The sudden and synchronous emergence of hundreds of thousands of people occupying public space” and “the intuitive identification of hundreds of thousands of people with each other.” That was August 1965.