Peter Jackson’s Beatles Remix
There was a time when Beatles fans were promised they would be treated to a truly extraordinary event this August 27th: the theatrical premiere of Peter Jackson’s documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. The project (which entailed going through some 56 hours of 16mm footage from the original Let it Be filming sessions, much of it never before seen) had been scuttled by the COVID-19 pandemic. But in December of last year, a teaser for the film was released online: nearly five glorious minutes of crystal- and colorfully-clear images of John, Paul, George, and Ringo (as well as Linda and Yoko). The images were a revelation for a number of reasons, Beatle-related and not.
For one thing, the images in Jackson’s teaser appeared to show The Beatles enjoying themselves–and each other. This went contrary to Beatles history, which has it that the “Get Back” sessions, as they were then known, were miserable for everyone involved. What was meant to be the follow-up to an enormously creative (if arduous) series of recording sessions that produced a successful double album (titled, simply, “The Beatles,” but commonly known as “The White Album”), the “Get Back” sessions, which were captured on film by documentary filmmaker Michael Lindsay Hogg, ended up being a document of The Beatles breaking up. Among the incidents captured for all posterity was a petty exchange between Paul and George, with the former directing his bandmate to play a certain way, much to the latter’s irritation:
PAUL: I really am trying to just say, “Look, lads, the band, you know. Should we try it like this?” You know.
GEORGE: It’s funny, though, how it only occurs when we record the, um-
PAUL: I know, on this one, it’s like should we play guitar all the way through “Hey Jude,” and I don’t think we should.
GEORGE: Okay, well, I don’t mind. I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.
When the footage was finally edited and released in theaters in 1970 as the 80–minute Let It Be (along with the album by the same name), The Beatles had already broken up. And so Let It Be was received as something like a snuff film, forcing viewers to witness the grim spectacle of the Fab Four slowly doing themselves in. And it looked like a snuff film, too. Grainy, splotchy, drab, and out of focus–the results of taking the original 16mm footage, splicing out the tops and bottoms of the frames, and blowing it up to 35mm for theatrical release. What was already pretty ugly in 16mm became magnified for the big screen.
This brings us to the next big revelation: Peter Jackson’s footage looks extraordinarily crisp. Recently, music fans who browse through YouTube in search of digitally remastered footage of their favorite bands from the 1970s performing live have been able to enjoy the truly extraordinary results produced by commercial software such as Video Enhance AI and AnyClip. Users of such relatively inexpensive Video AI software (based on the advancements of Artificial Intelligence technology, hence “Video AI”) can take grainy 8mm or 16mm footage and upscale, denoise, deinterlace, and restore each and every frame. In doing so, a standard definition (SD), analog document can be transformed into a high definition (HD) 4K or even 8K digital document (today, most televisions have doubled the standard HD image of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels to 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, or 4K., and 8K doubles that once more to a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels).
So crisp are the images, the viewer really feels immersed in them. Misshapen, desaturated globs within the frame are given clarity and definition and, in relation to each other, extraordinary depth. As noted in an article that appeared in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Lindsay Hogg recalls Jackson showing him the results of the remastering of his original 16mm footage: “'[Jackson] showed me a comparison of my Let It Be’s footage and his stuff,’ says Lindsay-Hogg, including how McCartney’s hair appeared as a single block of color in the original and ‘now you can see every single strand of hair.'”
In some obvious ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has frustrated not only Peter Jackson, who was forced to delay the project by more than a year, but fans as well. Not only was the film originally meant for a 2020 theatrical release, the new August 27, 2021 theatrical release, too, was dropped. At turns tantalizingly real and painfully out of reach, the Get Back project seemed cursed. But good things come to those who wait. While fans may not be able to see a feature-length version of The Beatles: Get Back in theaters at the end of this month as promised, they will be treated to something even more spectacular: a six-hour version to be aired over three nights on Disney+, November 25, 26, 27.
Fans may be muttering any number of Beatles lyrics to themselves upon hearing this news (“I’ve been in love before,” “I couldn’t stand the pain” “You don’t sound different, I’ve learned the game, I’m looking through you,” etc.). But the November premiere of the six-hour long The Beatles: Get Back, is a certainty. And fans can expect the same amazing clarity of images seen in Jackson’s documentary, The Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which took original WWI film footage and restored it to 8K. Says Jackson, “All we’ve done is use the technology we developed for the World War One film They Shall Not Grow Old, taking all this old First World War footage and restoring it. We haven’t tried to push the primary colours of the clothing up or anything. We’ve done no tricks like that. We’ve just balanced the skin tones, and the colours that you see, I’m assuming, are the colours that were there on the day. I mean, it does make you jealous of the 1960s, because the clothing is so fantastic.”
Fab.