Early in “The Beatles: Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s nearly eight-hour documentary about the making of the album “Let It Be,” the band forms a tight circle in the corner of a movie soundstage.
But as the hours passed, and Ono remained — painting at an easel, chewing a pastry, paging through a Lennon fan magazine — I found myself impressed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and ultimately dazzled by her performance.
“The Beatles: Get Back” is being read by some as an exculpatory document — proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles.
Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unimposing.
And yet there is something depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet, inconspicuous lump of a person.
A “mundane” task becomes peculiar when you choose to perform it in front of Paul McCartney’s face as he tries to write “Let It Be.” When you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes astonishing.
She was a pioneer of participatory artwork, a collaborator of experimental musicians like John Cage and a master at coyly appearing in spaces where she was not supposed to belong.
She was cast as the groupie from hell, a sexually domineering “dragon lady” and a witch who hypnotized Lennon into spurning the lads for some woman.
In a 1997 interview, she commented on the status of women in rock in the 1960s: “My first impression was that they were all wives, kind of sitting in the next room while the guys were talking,” she said.
In her 1964 text project “Grapefruit,” a kind of recipe book for staging art experiences, she instructs her audience “not to look at Rock Hudson but only Doris Day,” and in “The Beatles: Get Back,” she skillfully redirects the eye away from the band and toward herself.
She refuses to decamp to the sidelines, but she also resists acting out stereotypes; she appears as neither a doting naïf nor a needling busybody.
The “Let It Be” sessions were followed by the recording of “Abbey Road,” and according to the studio’s engineer, when Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a bed to be delivered to the studio; Ono tucked herself in, commandeered a microphone and invited friends to visit her bedside.
All of this was used to crudely fashion Ono into a cultural villain, but it would also later establish her as a kind of folk hero.
One day, Eastman’s young daughter, Heather, a bob-haired munchkin, whirls aimlessly about the studio.