A special reissue of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – The Ultimate Collection is coming out on April 23. Here's a new video from the John Lennon YouTube channel for the song "Look At Me," which includes previously unreleased 8mm footage of John and Yoko at home.
From InsideHook:
The footage was shot in 1968 at Lennon and Ono's home in Weybridge, Surrey between takes on two of the pair's short films, Film No. 5 ("Smile") and Two Virgins, which were both filmed by camera operator William Wareing. It includes shots of the couple at home as well as Lennon strumming an acoustic guitar.
"With the Plastic Ono Band albums, John and I liked the idea of this really raw, basic, truthful reality that we were going to be giving to the world," Ono writes in the book that accompanies the reissue. "We were influencing other artists, giving them courage, giving dignity to a certain style of vulnerability and strength that was not accepted in society at the time. It was a revolution for a Beatle to say, 'Listen: I'm human, I'm real.' It took a lot of courage for him to do it."
From YouTube:
On 9th June 1968, at John's home 'Kenwood' in Weybridge, Surrey, John & Yoko began a collaborative period of creative film-making that would end up lasting four years, beginning with two films called 'Film No. 5' ('Smile') (conceived by Yoko) and 'Two Virgins' (conceived by John & Yoko) that would premiere at the Chicago Film Festival later that year. The filming involved specialist high-speed 16mm cameras (in those days mainly used for filming scientific experiments) operated by William Wareing and his team. For 'Film No. 5' ('Smile'), the magic of John smiling is captured in ultra slow motion (with the film running through the camera at ultra high-speed), and for 'Two Virgins', they filmed with a different high-speed camera and used a trick that John had employed when filming with his Standard 8 cameras of rewinding all the film and running it through the camera a second time, to double expose the negative. They filmed John's face, rewound the film and then filmed Yoko's face, creating in-camera superimpositions of their faces merging. Excerpts from these two films can be seen in the music video Number 9 Dream."
