Tackling anything from Beatlesmania to the Watts riots and the nature of memory, Andrei Ujică redefines the documentary genre in TWST – Things We Said Today, letting the 1960s speak for themselves.
Director: Andrei Ujică
Genre: Documentary
Run Time: 86′
Venice World Premiere: September 4, 2024
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
“This is Radio Caroline On One-Nine-Nine,” says a DJ to a mic in the opening scene TWST – Things We Said Today, and just like that, we know exactly where we are. Director Andrei Ujică has placed us inside the legendary pirate radio station that broadcasted “non-stop pop music” offshore, off the coast of Essex, in the 1960s. “The time is two c’clock,” says the DJ, before putting on The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”.
Not long after that, the band makes an appearance: it’s August 13, 1965 and they’ve just landed in New York, ahead of their August 15 concert at Shea Stadium. They take some pictures outside the plane and enter the car that will take them to their hotel. As one of the windows rolls down and Paul McCartney’s face emerges behind it, a photographer loudly commands, “Say hello!”. “Hello!,” Paul shouts back, laughing, before the car sets off and we follow them into a press conference.
If you were to judge TWST – Things We Said Today by its first fifteen minutes, you’d think you have it all figured out. But as you anticipate being transported back to the Beatles’ 1965 US tour and the madness that took over the country, what you get, instead, is something else entirely. Soon, hand drawn sketches of strangers begin to appear, superimposed on the footage. They follow us back to the radio station, then into the streets of 1960s New York, as an ever-present, silent backdrop that accompanies the archival footage on screen, where even more unfamiliar faces are going about their days. What do these sketches represent? Who are these people? And what does this all have to do with The Beatles?
“Whose voice is it that’s dictating the story I want to write? […] Is it mine, or somebody else’s?,” asks yet another stranger in a voiceover, not long later, and we begin to get it. In Things We Said Today, Andrei Ujică does indeed tell us about Beatlemania, but he does so by letting the 1960s speak for themselves, through the stories of some the people who experienced the decade. And these “ghosts,” whose outlines become more and more tangible as the film unfolds, are so unequivocally human that it doesn’t even matter who they are, because their voices belong to us all.
And so, TWST – Things We Said Today tells us the tale of the son of a New York DJ who wanders through the city two days before the concert. We listen to his journal entries, where he attempts to make sense of a story he’s trying to write, and watch the black and white footage of a city that lives right in front of our eyes, in a way that we can recognize and even make our own. I learn from the press notes that the man is poet and essayist Geoffrey O’Brien, but that the story he’s dictating is only his own in part, as Ujică also attributes to him authorship of a Beatles-inspired tale the director wrote in his youth, called “Isabela, Friend of the Butterflies.”
It’s in the film’s final act that we meet Isabela, here represented by novelist Judith Kristen, who wrote a book on Beatlemania and who, like Geoffrey, also went to the concert on August 15. But if Geoffrey’s thoughts came alive in black and white in the first part of the movie, accompanied by footage from the time, Judith’s part of the film is more subjective. Her journals are paired with an 8mm ‘home movie’ that she shot in colour, depicting her travels from Philadelphia to New York as she meets up with her friends a few hours before the concert. Together, they visit The World’s Fair, in Queens, and we are right there with them anticipating the night ahead.
But TWST – Things We Said Today is not just about Geoffrey and Judith — or, rather, the nameless voices and drawings populating the frame throughout the movie. Their voiceover is just as important as what we see on the screen, from the fangirls singing “we love you Beatles oh yes we dooo” while waiting for their idols to the racial tensions of the Watts Riots, which played a key role in the Civil Rights movement. It’s all there for us to see, in the snapshot of a generation in constant evolution, whose contradictions make up a cohesive whole, just like the film itself.
So much work has gone into a documentary that was fourteen years in the making, and the end result is a film where every single scene has been carefully constructed to mean something, both visually and narratively. We only get 8 minutes of The Beatles in this Beatles documentary, yet the film still manages be unmistakably drenched in the era they shaped, capturing an entire generation whose struggles are still surprisingly – and, at times, frighteningly – relevant to this day.
TWST – Things We Said Today ends with a mesmerizing, transportative shot that, just like the film itself, shouldn’t work, and yet, astonishingly, it does. It’s the perfect culmination to a movie that managed to transport you to a specific moment in time, making you nostalgic, and also a little sad, for an era that’s long gone but whose legacy lives on. As the credits roll and the memories of strangers still linger in your mind, acquiring the tangible quality of the most vivid of dreams, it’s impossible not to think back to the titular song: “Someday, when we’re dreaming, […] then we will remember, things we said today.”
TWST – Things We Said Today had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2024. Read our review of The Beatles: Get Back!
