If you went to a rock-concert film in the ’70s, chances are that some of it was going to be in split screen: the trés counterculture technique of dividing the big screen into two parts (or maybe three or four), each one depicting the musical action from a different angle. What made split screen more than a bit trippy was the heady simultaneity of it: It was an invitation to absorb the same event, the same moment, in different ways, which amounted to a kind of stoned cinematic Cubism. (It also anticipated aspects of the digital age.) There were Hollywood dramas that made memorable use of split screen, notably “The Boston Strangler,” and famously “The Thomas Crown Affair” (though I always found the use of it in that film gimmicky). But there’s no doubt that the “Citizen Kane” of split screen was “Woodstock,” where much of the technique was orchestrated by one of the film’s then-unknown editors, Martin Scorsese.
All of which is to say: I was glad to see the generous and accomplished use of split screen in “Power to the People: John & Yoko in NYC,” a sizzling concert doc that captures the two benefit shows that John Lennon led at Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972. (The film is opening today for a limited theatrical run.) For me, the technique had a nostalgic effect — it took me back to my youthful days of seeing “Gimme Shelter” and “200 Motels” and “Mad Dogs & Englishmen.” More than that, though, I was reminded of what a fantastic technique it is. In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
Lennon was 31 when he gave these performances, with some experimental ephemera and three mainstream solo albums behind him (the great “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” the scattershot “Some Time in New York City,” and the intermittently inspired “Imagine”). They turned out to be the last and only full-length concerts he would ever give after leaving the Beatles. In his Army jacket and lollipop-blue round sunglasses, with shaggy long sideburns, Lennon gives off a fascinating air of self-involved indifference, expressed in the way that he chews gum for the entire concert. Maybe that was a way of calming his nerves, but the upshot is to give him a disaffected air that’s almost Lou Reed adjacent. He and Yoko and the band perform 15 songs, and at certain points he’s doggedly sincere, yet he’s also got the Lennon cheek (“Welcome to the rehearsal,” he warns the audience), and also the Lennon detachment, that underlying vibe of “Who gives a fuck, really?”
These are the same two concerts that were featured in Kevin Macdonald’s revelatory 2024 documentary “One to One: John & Yoko,” which chronicled the couple’s first two years of living in New York. That film, I have to say, selected the perfect live excerpts, such as the opening number, “New York City,” which has a propulsive bravado (it’s Lennon’s homage to his new home city, almost like his version of “Dirty Boulevard”), as well as Lennon’s riveting performance of “Mother,” in which the silences between lines are as dramatically musical as the song’s primal piano chords.
“Power to the People” includes those numbers, but it also gives you the shape and flow of the entire concert, which like the film itself is only 80 minutes long. (The brevity ties into Lennon’s can’t-be-bothered mystique.) We see the sold-out crowd of early-’70s post-hippies eating it up, we spot people like Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsberg in the audience (and Allen Klein backstage), and we get to drink in the way that Lennon, two years after the Beatles split up, presented himself as a rock ‘n’ roller who could command the stage without theatrics. He never even takes a lead guitar part, yet that’s tied into what’s cool about him, the fact that he looks like someone with nothing to prove.
Oddly, the title song of “Power to the People” isn’t in the movie. But there are several Yoko numbers, and without getting into the great Yoko debate of it all, let me just say that even if you dig her proto-punk caterwauling on songs like “Move on Fast” and “Born in a Prison” and “We’re All Water” and “Open Your Box,” all of which are featured here, a little of Yoko the Avant-Garde Rock Priestess goes a long way.
The band is so good! I know Elephant’s Memory mostly from their extraordinary song “Old Man Willow,” which played during the Andy Warhol party sequence of “Midnight Cowboy,” but in “Power to the People” they rock out with a fervor worthy of the slovenly glory of the “Exile on Main St.” era. Jim Keltner is an ace drummer, and the sax player Stan Bronstein blows curlicued riffs as potent as those of the great Bobby Keys.
Lennon performs one Beatles song, a tight rendition of “Come Together” (though it lacks the magical sound of the studio version). He also does “Instant Karma,” a majestic ditty that has aged well, and “Imagine,” a utopian-anthem-on-autopilot that has not. The Lennon song of the period that’s inexplicably not here, and that I missed hearing most: “Gimme Some Truth,” one of the great tracks off “Imagine,” with lyrics so cutting (“I’ve had enough of watching scenes with schizophrenic egocentric paranoic prima donnas…”) that they seem even more timely 55 years later. The whole movie culminates in an extended reggae-beat version of “Give Peace a Chance” (introduced with a Hitler law-and-order speech read out by Yoko), that turns the concert — and the movie — into a good-time block party, as the stage overflows with gyrating guest stars: Stevie Wonder, Melanie, Phil Spector. Then, suddenly, you look at the throng and you notice that John is gone. He has slipped away without taking a curtain call, which might almost be his way of saying that it’s the people who have the power. Or so he’d like to imagine.
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