The Beatles: Get Back (TV Program)

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    A.I. Made These Movies Sharper. Critics Say It Ruined Them.

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    Machine-learning technologies are being used in film restoration for new home video releases. But some viewers strongly dislike the results.In 1998, Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, was hunched in front of a 12-inch monitor at a postproduction house, carefully preparing “Titanic” for release on LaserDisc and VHS. A state-of-the-art computer process had made it possible for Burdick and his team to scour the film frame by frame, removing tiny imperfections embedded in the original negative: little scratches, flakes of dirt, even water stains that smeared the image. The computer could erase these blemishes using a kind of copy-paste tool, concealing the defects with information from another frame.Burdick, now a senior vice president at the company, told me that this process “seemed like freaking magic at the time.” And yet the results were not entirely well-received. “There were a lot of people who said that this was the most beautiful VHS they’d ever seen in their life, because we’d gotten rid of all that gobbledygook,” he recalled. “But there were a lot of folks who said, ‘This is not right! You’ve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch.’ People were really hard-core about it.”In the decades since, home video formats have reached higher and higher resolutions, with VHS and LaserDisc giving way to DVD and Blu-ray, and eventually to ultra high-definition 4K discs, known as Ultra HD Blu-rays. As the picture quality has improved, restoration tools have evolved with them, making it easier than ever for filmmakers to fine-tune their work using computers. Several of Cameron’s films, including “The Abyss,” “True Lies” and “Aliens,” were recently released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in newly restored versions that are clearer and sharper than ever before — the product of painstaking attention from Lightstorm and Cameron himself. “I think they look the best they’ve ever looked,” Burdick said.Bill Paxton with Schwarzenegger in the film’s streaming version, top, and the Blu-ray version. Details in the background and colors in the foreground are clearer in the new take.20th Century FoxBut as with the old “Titanic” home video, these restorations have proved controversial, with many viewers objecting strenuously to their pristine new look. What has caught the particular ire of critics is the fact that these versions have been restored, in part, using artificial intelligence. Park Road Post Production, the New Zealand company owned by the filmmaker Peter Jackson, helped clean up Cameron’s films using some of the same proprietary machine-learning software used on Jackson’s documentaries “The Beatles: Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The images in Cameron’s classic blockbusters were refined in a way that many felt looked strange and unnatural.The level of detail is eye-popping. Water looks crystalline; colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky. Some surfaces, however, do look a little glossy, with a buffed sheen that appears almost lacquered. It can be hard to pinpoint what is changed. But there does seem to be a difference, and depending on the viewer, it can feel slightly uncanny.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Pop Music, 2021 Was the Year of the Deep Dive

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      Documentaries brought us closer to musicians this year, and it wasn’t always pretty.The pandemic, it seems, sent certain enterprising music lovers into editing rooms. For those still leery of gathering for a live concert, the 2021 consolation prize was not a slew of ephemeral livestreams, but an outpouring of smart, intent music documentaries that weren’t afraid to stretch past two hours long. With screen time begging to be filled, it was the year of the deep dive.Those documentaries included a binge-watch of the Beatles at work in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back”; a visual barrage to conjure musical disruption in Todd Haynes’s “Velvet Underground”; far-reaching commentary atop ecstatic performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Questlove’s “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”; and a surprisingly candid chronicle of Billie Eilish’s whirlwind career — at 16, 17 and 18 years old — in R.J. Cutler’s “The World’s a Little Blurry.” The documentaries were about reclaiming and rethinking memory, about unexpected echoes across decades, about transparency and the mysteries of artistic production.They were also a reminder of how scarce hi-fi sound and images were back in the analog era, and how ubiquitous they are now. Half a century ago, the costs of film and tape were not negligible, while posterity was a minor consideration. Experiencing the moment seemed far more important than preserving any record of it. It would be decades before “pics or it didn’t happen.”The Velvet Underground, in its early days, was simultaneously a soundtrack and a canvas for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia club-sized happening that projected images on the band members as they played. Although the Velvets’ social set included plenty of artists and filmmakers, apparently no one got the obvious idea of capturing a full-length performance by the Velvets in their prime. What a remarkable missed opportunity.Haynes’s documentary creatively musters circumstantial evidence instead. There are memories from eyewitnesses (and only eyewitnesses, a relief). And Haynes fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images, sometimes blinking wildly in a tiled screen that suggests Windows 10 running amok. News, commercials and bits of avant-garde films flicker alongside Warhol’s silent contemplations of band members staring back at the camera. The faces and fragments are there, in a workaround that translates the far-off blur of the 1960s into a 21st-century digital grid.Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images.Apple TV+Luckily there was more foresight in 1969, when Hal Tulchin had five video cameras rolling at the Harlem Cultural Festival, which later became known as “Black Woodstock.” New York City (and a sponsor, Maxwell House) presented a series of six weekly free concerts at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) with a lineup that looks almost miraculous now, including Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone and Mongo Santamaria, just for starters. Tulchin’s crew shot more than 40 hours of footage, capturing the eager faces and righteous fashions of the audience along with performers who were knocking themselves out for an almost entirely Black crowd. Yet nearly all of Tulchin’s material went unseen until Questlove finally assembled “Summer of Soul” from it.The music in “Summer of Soul” moves from peak to peak, with unstoppable rhythms, rawly compelling voices, snappy dance steps and urgent messages. But “Summer of Soul” doesn’t just revel in the performances. Commentary from festivalgoers, performers and observers (including the definitive critic Greg Tate) supply context for a festival that had the Black Panthers as security, and that the city likely supported, in part, to channel energy away from potential street protests after the turbulence of 1968.Questlove’s subtitle and his song choices — B.B. King singing about slavery, Ray Baretto proudly claiming a multiracial America, Nina Simone declaiming “Backlash Blues,” Rev. Jesse Jackson preaching about Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, even the Fifth Dimension finding anguish and redemption in “Let the Sunshine In” — make clear that the performers weren’t offering escapism or complacency. After five decades in the archives, “Summer of Soul” is still timely in 2021; it’s anything but quaint. Here’s hoping that far more of the festival footage emerges; bring on the expanded version or the mini-series. A soundtrack album is due in January.The music in “Summer of Soul,” which includes the 5th Dimension, moves from peak to peak, but the film doesn’t just revel in the performances. Searchlight PicturesCameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be,” when the Beatles set themselves a peculiar, quixotic challenge in January of 1969: to make an album fast, on their own (though they eventually got the invaluable help of Billy Preston on keyboards), on camera and with a live show to follow. It was one more way that the Beatles were a harbinger of things to come, as if they had envisioned our digital era, when bands habitually record video while they work and upload work-in-progress updates for their fans. In the 1960s, recording studios were generally regarded as private work spaces, from which listeners would eventually receive only the (vinyl) finished project. The “Let It Be” sessions represented a new transparency.Its results, in 1970, were the “Let It Be” album, reworked by Phil Spector, and the dour, disjointed 80-minute documentary “Let It Be” by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg — both of them a letdown after the album “Abbey Road,” which was released in 1969 but recorded after the “Let It Be” sessions. The Beatles had announced their breakup with solo albums.The three-part, eight-hour “Get Back” may well have been closer to what the Beatles hoped to put on film in 1969. It’s a bit overlong; I will never need to see another close-up of toast at breakfast. But in all those hours of filming, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras took in the iterative, intuitive process of the band constructing Beatles songs: building and whittling down arrangements, playing Mad Libs with syllables of lyrics, recharging itself with oldies and in jokes, having instruments in hand when inspiration struck. Jackson’s definitive sequence — the song “Get Back” emerging as Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are jamming one morning — merges laddish camaraderie with deep artistic instinct.Cameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be” in January 1969.Apple Corps“Get Back” newly reveals the situations that the Beatles were juggling even as they pushed themselves toward their self-imposed (and then self-extended) deadline. They moved from the acoustically inhospitable Twickenham film studios to a hastily assembled basement studio at Apple. They seriously mulled over some preposterous locations — an amphitheater in Tripoli? a children’s hospital? — for the impending live show. There was so much tension that George Harrison walked out of the band, only to reconcile and rejoin after a few days. Meanwhile, they faced predatory coverage from British tabloids. It’s a wonder they could concentrate on making music at all.Yet as established stars, the Beatles could work largely within their own protective bubble in 1969. Fast-forward 50 years for “The World’s a Little Blurry,” and Billie Eilish faces some of the same pressures as the Beatles did: songwriting, deadlines, playing live, the press. But she’s also dealing with them as a teenage girl, in an era when there are cameras everywhere — even under her massage table — and the internet multiplies every bit of visibility and every attack vector. “I literally can’t have a bad moment,” she realizes.In “The World’s a Little Blurry,” Eilish performs to huge crowds singing along with every word, sweeps the top awards at the 2019 Grammys and gets a hug from her childhood pop idol, Justin Bieber. But as in her songs — tuneful, whispery and often nightmarish — there’s as much trauma as there is triumph. Eilish also copes with tearing a ligament onstage, her recurring Tourette’s syndrome, a video-screen breakdown when she headlines the Coachella festival, an apathetic boyfriend, inane interviewers, endless meet-and-greets and constant self-questioning about accessibility versus integrity. It’s almost too much information. Still, a few years or a few decades from now, who knows what an expanded version might add? More

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      The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles

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      In Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.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. Inexplicably, Yoko Ono is there. She perches in reach of John Lennon, her bemused face oriented toward him like a plant growing to the light. When Paul McCartney starts to play “I’ve Got a Feeling,” Ono is there, stitching a furry object in her lap. When the band starts into “Don’t Let Me Down,” Ono is there, reading a newspaper. Lennon slips behind the piano and Ono is there, her head hovering above his shoulder. Later, when the group squeezes into a recording booth, Ono is there, wedged between Lennon and Ringo Starr, wordlessly unwrapping a piece of chewing gum and working it between Lennon’s fingers. When George Harrison walks off, briefly quitting the band, there is Ono, wailing inchoately into his microphone.At first I found Ono’s omnipresence in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving. The vast set only emphasizes the ludicrousness of her proximity. Why is she there? I pleaded with my television set. 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. My attention kept drifting toward her corner of the frame. I was seeing intimate, long-lost footage of the world’s most famous band preparing for its final performance, and I couldn’t stop watching Yoko Ono sitting around, doing nothing.From left, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon play as Yoko Ono arranges some papers.Apple Corps“The Beatles: Get Back” is being read by some as an exculpatory document — proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles. “She never has opinions about the stuff they’re doing,” Jackson, who crafted the series out of more than 60 hours of footage, told “60 Minutes.” “She’s a very benign presence and she doesn’t interfere in the slightest.” Ono, also a producer on the series, tweeted an article without comment that claims she is merely performing “mundane tasks” as the band gets to work. In the series, McCartney himself — from the vantage of January 1969, more than a year before the band’s public dissolution — pokes fun at the idea that the Beatles would end “because Yoko sat on an amp.”Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unimposing. Indeed, she is not the set’s most meddlesome interloper: That is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the hapless director of the original documentary “Let It Be,” who keeps urging the band to stage a concert in an ancient amphitheater in Libya or perhaps at a hospital for children suffering from reassuringly minor ailments.And yet there is something depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet, inconspicuous lump of a person. Of course her appearance in the studio is obtrusive. The fact that she is not there to directly influence the band’s recordings only makes her behavior more ridiculous. To deny this is to sap her of her power.What to Know About ‘The Beatles: Get Back’Peter Jackson’s seven-plus hour documentary series, which explores the most contested period in the band’s history, is available on Disney Plus.Re-examining How the Beatles Ended: Think you know what happened? Jackson may change your mind.Yoko Ono’s Omnipresence: The performance artist is everywhere in the film. At first it’s unnerving, then dazzling.6 Big Moments: Don’t have time to watch the full documentary? Here’s a guide to its eye-opening scenes.From the beginning, Ono’s presence feels intentional. Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tent-like appearance; it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment. 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. The documentary’s shaggy run-time reveals Ono’s provocation in all its intensity. It’s as if she is staging a marathon performance piece, and in a way, she is.The Beatles play their final public performance as Yoko Ono looks on.Apple Corps/Disney+Jackson has called his series “a documentary about a documentary,” and we are constantly reminded that we are watching the band produce its image for the camera. Ono was, of course, already an accomplished performance artist when she encountered Lennon, seven years her junior, at a gallery show in 1966. 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. In 1971, she would stage an imaginary exhibition of ephemeral works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the catalog, she is photographed in front of the museum holding a sign that says “F,” recasting it as the “Museum of Modern [F]art.”The idea that Ono doomed the band was always a canard that smacked of misogyny and racism. 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 1970, Esquire published an article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” that promised to reveal “the Yoko nobody Onos,” featuring an illustration of Ono looming over Lennon, who is rendered as a cockroach on her leash.) These slurs would spiral into an indefatigable pop-culture meme that has haunted generations of women accused of intruding on male genius.Ono did not “break up the Beatles.” (If Lennon’s distancing from the band was influenced by his desire to explore other pursuits, including his personal and creative relationship with Ono, that was his call.) But she did intrude. In the documentary, McCartney politely complains that his songwriting with Lennon is disrupted by Ono’s omnipresence. For her part, she was vigilant about escaping the typical role of the artist’s wife. 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. “I was afraid of being something like that.” Later, she would dedicate her barbed 1973 song, “Potbelly Rocker,” to the “wives of rockers who are nameless.”The Beatles record the album that will become “Let It Be.” Yoko Ono is also there.Apple CorpsIn 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. Her image stands in contrast to that of other Beatles partners — modelesque white women in chic outfits who occasionally swoop in with kisses, nod encouragingly and slip unobtrusively away. Linda Eastman, McCartney’s future wife, lingers a little longer, occasionally circulating and photographing the band. Eastman was a rock portraitist, and one of the film’s most fascinating moments shows her in deep conversation with Ono — as if to prove Ono’s point, it is a rare on-set interaction with no recovered audio.Ono simply never leaves. 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. Instead she seems engaged in a kind of passive resistance, defying all expectations of women who enter the realm of rock genius.The Barenaked Ladies song “Be My Yoko Ono” compares Ono to a ball and chain (for the record, Ono said of the song, “I liked it”), but as the sessions go on, she assumes a weightless quality. She seems to orbit Lennon, eclipsing his bandmates and becoming a physical manifestation of his psychological distance from his old artistic center of gravity. Later, her performance would grow in intensity. 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. This is a lot of things: grotesquely codependent, terribly rude and iconic. The more Ono’s presence is challenged, the more her performance escalates.Ono wailing inchoately into Harrison’s microphone during his absence from the recording sessions.Apple CorpsAll 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. “It all comes down to YOKO ONO,” the drummer Tobi Vail wrote in a zine connected to her riot grrrl band Bikini Kill in 1991. “Part of what your boyfriend teaches you is that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles,” she writes. That story “makes you into the opposite of his band.” It relegates women to the audience and ridicules them for attempting to make their own music. In Hole’s 1997 song “20 Years in the Dakota,” Courtney Love summons Ono’s powers against a new generation of whining fanboys, and says that riot grrrl is “forever in her debt.” Vail called Ono “the first punk rock girl singer ever.”In Jackson’s film, you can see the seeds of this generational shift. One day, Eastman’s young daughter, Heather, a bob-haired munchkin, whirls aimlessly about the studio. Then she spies Ono singing. Heather observes her with scrunch-faced intensity, steps up to the microphone and wails. More

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      in Television

      Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind.

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      The director’s three-part documentary “Get Back” explores the most contested period in the band’s history and reveals there’s still plenty to debate.It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a cavernous film studio in London, with cameras rolling and microphones everywhere. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says matter of factly, as he plugs in his bass guitar.With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, a tray of toast and jam by their side, McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration. Within minutes, a mid-tempo groove takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. “Get back,” he sings in a faint howl. “Get back to where you once belonged.” Almost like magic, a Beatles classic begins to form out of nothing.Later that same day, after John Lennon arrives, the four rock deities gather in a circle and bicker. They have loose plans for a concert TV special featuring brand-new songs, but most of the men appear to be dreading it — and may be dreading each other, too. Lennon, who seems to space out for much of the meeting, declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it.Harrison blurts out what they may all be thinking: “Maybe we should have a divorce?”Those back-to-back scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” a seven-hour-plus project that will be shown in three parts on Disney Plus from Nov. 25 to 27, encapsulate the twin sides of the most contested period in Beatles history — the glory of artistic creation by the world’s most beloved and influential rock band, and the grueling conflicts that led to its breakup, announced a year later.For Beatles fans, or any student of 20th-century pop culture, these are astonishing glimpses into the band’s working life and the tensions that surrounded them.“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the last four years in a darkened editing suite surrounded by Beatles memorabilia. “‘I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working,’” he said, describing a lifelong dream like a child praying for the ultimate Christmas present. “‘Just for one day, just watch them, and I’ll be really quiet and sit there.’”“Well, guess what?” he continued. “The time machine’s here now.”Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.”Nicola Dove/DisneyJackson’s film is also a volley in one of the longest-running debates in Beatles scholarship. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit. “I hope we passed the audition,” Lennon quips at the show’s end.That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP. In time, that film took on a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse, and later testimony from members of the Beatles seemed to buttress that view. Lennon described the sessions as “hell,” and Harrison called them the group’s “winter of discontent.”Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados. Lindsay-Hogg’s film, they argue, was selectively edited for maximum dreariness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup — “Abbey Road,” the Beatles’ true swan song, was made after “Let It Be” but released first — while evidence from bootlegged tapes suggests a mixture of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician struggling through Take 24 on a deadline.The mere existence of “Get Back” is a sign that, more than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their history is still unsettled, and remains endlessly ripe for deep-dive research and partisan counternarratives.Jackson’s film, arriving with the authority of a lightning bolt hurled from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final word in the argument over this period, though the story it tells is far from simple. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — and an avowed Beatles nut — was given access to nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, with no brief, Jackson said, but to restore the film and tell the full story.From left: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the studio.Apple CorpsThe Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like the band dancing and clowning in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, Apple Corps’ chief executive, promised that the new film would “bust the myth” that these sessions were “the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin.” Yet Jackson said the band has had no influence over his work.“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a whitewash” because the Beatles have authorized the film, Jackson said with a laugh. “But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look at what goes on.”For fans who remember Lindsay-Hogg’s film, or have read dismal anecdotes in any of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. We see the Beatles cracking each other up at the mic, mimicking posh accents and performing absurdist slapstick as if in a “Monty Python” skit.“You see these four great friends, great musicians, who just lock in and develop these songs, and you see it all onscreen,” Jackson said.Day after day, new material takes shape. Polishing the lyrics to the song “Get Back,” McCartney and Lennon test out names for a character who departs his Arizona home: Jojo Jackson, Jojo Carter, Jojo Daphne. Shaving off the last name gives McCartney enough syllables for some more specificity in the story: “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona …”Lennon, chewing gum, glances up to ask: “Is Tucson in Arizona?”The original “Let It Be” was shot on 16 millimeter film and blown up to grainy 35 millimeter. Generations of fans, if they’ve seen it at all, have had access to the movie only in crummy bootlegs transferred from videotape. It has never been officially released on DVD or in online formats.I told Jackson that when I finally saw “Let It Be,” 20-odd years ago, my local video rental shop required a $100 cash deposit. Jackson grabbed a vintage VHS copy and said he had long regretted not buying it when visiting the United States in the early 1980s, but the format was unplayable on his machine in New Zealand. While making “Get Back,” he tracked down an original on eBay for $200.“I don’t have a VHS machine,” he said, “so I still can’t play it.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside Fortress Beatle. Attendants pour glasses of wine as the musicians rehearse; Yoko Ono paints Japanese calligraphy while Lennon and McCartney, a few feet away, yuk their way through “Two of Us” in goofy accents.But the misery is never far away, and as the arguments grind on, it starts to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still come together at all. At one point, Harrison briefly quits the band, apparently fed up with his second-fiddle status. In the studio cafeteria, Lennon tells McCartney that the band’s rift with their lead guitarist has been “a festering wound.”After Harrison walks out, the remaining Beatles jam loudly and angrily. Starr tears through the drums. Ono, dressed all in black, stands at a microphone and wails to a wild climax — perhaps the most violent sound the Beatles ever created.A recurring theme is the band’s discomfort over the role of Ono, who sits by Lennon’s side constantly during the sessions and will come to be vilified by fans for her supposed role in the Beatles’ breakup. A companion book to the film, with further transcripts from the tapes, quotes Lennon telling McCartney: “I would sacrifice you all for her.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside the Beatles’ cloistered world.Apple CorpsYet it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by the events of the day or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight. Peter Brown, who was a top executive at Apple during this time, said in an interview that the troubles began with the success of “Sgt. Pepper” in 1967.“They were doing things that they’d never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off,” Brown said. “And of course it took off like crazy. Then how do you follow that?”Some of the drama, of course, may be typical band stuff. Neil Finn, of the New Zealand group Crowded House, said that Jackson showed his band about four hours of footage earlier this year. “We all wept,” he wrote in an email.“So much of it struck a chord with me from my own rehearsals and recording experiences,” Finn added. “Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of blustering with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really. You can see the others staring in disbelief. I’ve seen that look before.”But the stakes were incredibly high for the Beatles, and the prospect of the band’s dissolution hangs like a cloud over almost the entire film. Early on, McCartney floats an idea for the still-undefined TV special. Their performance, he proposes, would be interspersed with news reports about earthquakes and other “red hot” events around the world. “And at the end,” McCartney says, “the final bulletin is: ‘The Beatles have broken up.’”To some extent, “Get Back” and the original “Let It Be” are exhibits in a study of truth. Does the footage actually show the endgame of the Beatles, or has history gotten it wrong all these years? Does the weight of the evidence point to the band being joyful and creatively fecund, or fed up with each other’s company? The answer may be: all of the above.In one of many moments of levity, Starr hoists a mug behind the drum kit.Apple CorpsIn a note included with a new reissue of the album “Let It Be,” McCartney writes that the original film “was pretty sad as it dealt with the breakup of our band, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us.”Lindsay-Hogg believes that not only fans, but likely also members of the Beatles themselves, have been misreading “Let It Be” for years.“I think part of the rap that ‘Let It Be’ has had is no one has seen it for a very long time,” he said in an interview. “And it got very confused with the time it came out, which was just after they’d broken up.”Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They went on to record “Abbey Road” later that year, with great care; most of the songs on that album, including “Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Carry That Weight” and “Something,” are heard in early stages during “Get Back.”But Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh. If there is a true culprit in the breakup, it was the business conflicts that ensued during 1969, when the group tussled over its management, and Lennon and McCartney tried but failed to take control of the company that held their songwriting rights.Those problems are foreshadowed in “Get Back” with the utterance of a single name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to pitch his services for the band. Shortly after the events shown in “Get Back,” Lennon, Harrison and Starr all signed on with Klein; McCartney declined, and the schism was never repaired. Klein died in 2009.“Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles,” Jackson said, “but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end.”If Beatles’ scholarship and fandom has proved anything, it is that even a contradictory summation of the band and its influence can still hold true. The Beatles were a pop boy band that ended up pushing the creative boundaries of rock music further than anyone else; nearly every day of their existence together has been documented exhaustively, though a full accounting of their motivations is impossible.“Get Back” seems to contain all those multitudes — the delight, the tension, the fighting and the wonder of the Beatles simply playing music on the roof.“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Jackson said. “There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. Apple Corps More