Both films respectfully explore a kind of living pop culture monument while it was shakily undergoing seismic shifts and creative convulsions, and both are strongly elegiac, but each for different reasons and by using different methods. Both focus on the same remarkable moments in the band’s shared struggles to maintain some semblance of creative togetherness while in the midst of personal and professional turmoil. That historic 1969-1970 period of the Beatles’ legendary, short but intense eight-year-long lifespan as a working group, is intimately examined in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary Let It Be about the recording of the album of the same name and now more fully in Jackson’s seven-and-a-half-hour magnum opus, carefully crafted from sixty hours of Lindsay-Hogg’s footage. Luckily for us however, Peter Jackson’s masterfully edited documentary called Get Back at least contributes somewhat to their rehabilitation at celebrities anonymous. To some extent, this might just be the occupational hazard of any huge cultural icon, but it could also be a revealing indication of how much we all want to believe what we want to believe, despite what the facts and evidence may show us otherwise. Not just the fact that they shared an intimate partnership with a famous musician and pop star but also the fact that they have often been collaterally damaged victims of an ongoing mythology about who they actually were and what they actually did. To think of Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney in the same sentence, let alone in the same artfully appreciative article, might strike some people as a surprising proposition, and yet as a narrative ballad they share much more in common that you might at first imagine.
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