TWST – Things We Said Today

(Andrei Ujică, France/Romania, 2024)

When I was on a film festival jury with Andrei Ujică (The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, 2010) in 2012, he had already done a lot of work on this project. I recall him describing it as being about the “mysterious week” that The Beatles spent in New York in 1965. He and his assistants were busy trying to find every, ephemeral piece of archival footage (image and/or sound) that could possibly throw light on this ‘mystery’ (i.e., the band members mostly, wisely kept out of sight of the public eye except when they strictly had to show up to talk or perform).

Twelve years later, the film finally appears. Ujică now introduces it as a work not about The Beatles, but, rather, the effect of The Beatles – how they affected, or at least reverberated through and resonated with, that specific cultural time and place. The band’s relative invisibility cues, as it were, a powerful, obsessive fantasia that spreads throughout Manhattan and beyond. (Note: filmmaker-critic-programmer Kent Jones is credited as executive producer and also manager of the New York shoot.)

That’s the film’s premise-conceit, at any rate. A ‘city symphony’, no doubt, plugging into a long and venerable cinema tradition. But is TWST entirely worthy of that tradition?

For the first 15 minutes or so, it’s almost exactly the same as every documentary-compilation you see on TV that covers, briefly or at length, this same moment in the band’s trajectory. The Beatles getting off a plane. The Beatles giving a press conference. The Beatles trying to enter a hotel. The premiere of Help! at a cinema. The Beatles on the Shea Stadium stage (but note: since this is not an authorised Peter Jackson reconstruction, there are no Beatles tracks in it anywhere beyond a few stolen seconds, only other people’s music!).

And, at every point, fans and more fans (girls, mostly), screaming, crying, rationalising their mad passion to eager, on-the-spot reporters. What did Edward Colless & David Kelly once write in their early ‘80s essay series “The Lost World”?

The fainting fit of the young girl at the concert, her collapse as the consumer of the spectacle, collapses her into the production of the spectacle – Beatlemania. What affects her is her own effect.

But that was the Baudrillardian ‘80s, and this is Now. Where is Ujică going with this? What new idea or context is he going to draw out of this mass of raw material? Gradually – rather too gradually – he introduces two other elements that take the archival montage in a direction (mercifully) different than mere Beatles-glimpses. Two voice-overs: one (the more successful in its expressive goal) is a sort of auto-fictional, retroactive memoir by well-known film-and-lit. guy Geoffrey O’Brien – whose connection to the Event was through his father Joe, a radio DJ with a degree of access to the band – and the other is a female fan’s more ordinary diary record. Lost adolescents in a lost world!

These two strands are united – sort of – by a third literary element penned by Ujică himself: a romantic/mystical tale of butterflies. And that contribution cues the visual-pictorial element intended to transform and glue together the stream of imagery: rather simple, primitive animations provided by Yann Kebbi. These inclusions are not the best or wisest choices that could have been made; I found them clumsy and superfluous – a way of desperately padding out and drawing lines between the accumulated fragments … at least until the stirring, colourful finale.

So we have, conjured, a city stirred, mysteriously, by the rhythms of The Beatles – seeping out into the streets, interacting with daily lives and extraordinary events. There’s the inevitable documentation (both in grainy black-and-white imagery and precious archival radio-audio) of racial turbulence, of “revolution in the air”. There’s the spread of mass media. There are streets, segregated zones, fairgrounds, expositions … The film rambles on through such fairly predictable stations of the social grid.

TWST (a shocking title) is not a terribly well-organised essay-film – particularly given all the time and effort that went into it. The montage is often lazily articulated, and it takes a long, long time to find and announce its focus – that is, if it ever really manages to do that. It makes you appreciate, by contrast, the base-level craft of narration and information-arrangement that characterises, for instance, Chris Marker’s work. Not to mention the wit and speed of Marker’s associative editing.

Whenever I have the opportunity to consult with documentary filmmakers on projects they wish to do, I usually pose to them this question: you’ve got the concept, but do you have the footage? In the case of TWST, it’s a reverse problem: there’s footage aplenty, but not a strong-enough, driving, all-cohering concept. Which is a pity.

© Adrian Martin May-June 2025