“An intriguing and original way to look at our past and see how history is shaped once all the dust is blown off.”

A snapshot of a city and a country in the tumultuous times of the mid-1960s, Andrei Ujică juxtaposes the momentous and the mundane in his hybrid documentary TWST / Things We Said Today. What is momentous and what is mundane remains for history to decide, so looking back 60 years later, we can maybe say that America’s priorities at the time were wrong, but that passes over the fact that historic events are rarely recognized as such in the moment. Named after a Beatles song and framed around the arrival of The Beatles in New York in August of 1965, ahead of their concert at the now demolished Shea Stadium, the film eventually goes beyond New York’s city limits and the world of music to let in shreds of American life during the time between John, Paul, George, and Ringo landing at JFK airport and their concert two days later. Some of those shreds in hindsight made a far bigger mark on the US’s collective history and memory, but to the semi-fictional characters that Ujică introduces to give TWST a quasi-narrative these events were little more than news stories, background noise to what they saw as the most important moment in history, or at least their history. It is an interesting reflection on our current times, in which the world is burning while most people are more concerned with their day-to-day lives; what you can comprehend and what you can cope with has more importance for most.

As was the case with his previous films, of which Videograms of a Revolution and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu are probably the best-known works, Ujică’s TWST is comprised of archival material from the era, from news reels to home videos and on various formats. The key difference from the rest of his work is that in TWST Ujică introduces two fictional strands, although the characters in question are based on two real-life people. Their introduction, or at least one of them, doesn’t truly occur until well into the film though. Before that it is Beatlemania taking over New York, from the legion of reporters welcoming the Fab Four on JFK’s landing strip to hordes of screaming teenage girls in front of the historic Warwick Hotel; from street interviews to a chaotic press conference, where an unruly and lightly bored quartet of English superstars routinely swats away any questions that try to poke below the surface. Vietnam is offhandedly mentioned, the first hint that as New York goes wild for four Liverpudlians, there may be more important stuff going on elsewhere.

This press conference is also where we are first introduced to Geoffrey O’Brien, a budding writer who would later go on to become a well-known poet, and who was the son of a local radio DJ. Over the course of the film Geoffrey’s fictional story plays out in voice over (done by actor Tommy McCabe) through conversations with other people, but his first appearance is at the Beatles presser, asking a question. He is also somewhat physically present in the film, as a vaguely drawn figure, courtesy of French artist Yann Kebbi, and we will see him return throughout several scenes of the film, although his presence as a voice reciting an auto-fictional account by O’Brien himself is what leaves the biggest impression. It is through Geoffrey that the bigger issues of the time seep into the film, most notably the riots which took place in the Watts neighborhood and its surrounding areas of Los Angeles over five days, motivated by anger at the racist and abusive practices of the LAPD, as well as grievances over employment discrimination, segregation, and poverty in L.A. These images come in through news reports playing on television on the other side of the country, but later Geoffrey himself goes into Harlem to witness the poor living conditions of its black population and to speak to people. These scenes are an overt reference to the earlier press conference, where John Lennon answers ‘Harlem’ in response to a question on which place in New York he would love to visit. Was that ignorance or a sly comment on the part of Lennon?

Whereas Geoffrey is used as a vessel to take a deeper look at America’s problems at the time, the film eventually introduces Judith Kristen (voiced by Thérèse Azzara), a young Beatles fan who visits New York before attending the concert, as an animated counterpoint. Judith, now a published author with a novel about a surprise date with George Harrison in her oeuvre, is a happy-go-lucky white girl from the suburbs whose mind isn’t on things like racism or poverty. She’s just excited to see The Beatles live, and her world is a far cry from Watts or Harlem (notably, the footage changes to color). With her group of friends she attends another historic event that has now more or less eroded from memory, the New York World’s Fair. As they daydream about unexpectedly running into George Harrison, or discuss whether they should see Michelangelo’s Pietà (which was exhibited at the fair), the contrast between the daily lives of these girls and those living just a few miles away in Harlem couldn’t be bigger.

As TWST reaches its logical endpoint, the Shea Stadium concert, Geoffrey’s and Judith’s stories converge, but they had been connected before by excerpts from a short story Ujică wrote in 1972, ‘Isabela, the Butterfly’s Friend’. Butterflies will play an important role in TWST‘s lyrical and gorgeous ending, a bit of unexpected playfulness in a film that is artful, but by virtue of being a smartly edited series of archive scenes and a film that wants to show societal contrast, also serious and scattershot. The film definitely meanders at times, and while scenes of (predominantly white) people enjoying Jones Beach or shots of workers at New York’s fish market have their function, they do break up the narrative thrust Ujică introduces through his two ‘characters’. Conceptually, TWST / Things We Said Today is an intriguing and original way to look at our past and see how history is shaped once all the dust is blown off. Its execution is artistically sound, but at times too unfocused to keep its ideas at the forefront. That doesn’t diminish the fact that this is a relevant work, but one can’t shake the feeling that another round of editing might have delivered a tighter film.