The Beatles’ Let It Be returns remastered after 50 years – 05/10/2024 – Illustrated

On July 20, 1969 — a Sunday on which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the Moon — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were in a movie theater watching a private screening of the first cut of the film “Let It Be”, which at the time didn’t even have that title.

The version presented to the Beatles by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg was about an hour longer than the final version that was released. The next day, the director had already received orders to make cuts, which left the film 80 minutes long.

Re-released this week on Disney+, “Let It Be” returns to the screen for the first time in a restored version, on a date chosen to mark exactly 54 years since the release of the album of the same name, in 1970.

At the time, the film’s premiere took place five days later, without the presence of any Beatle, as the announcement of Paul McCartney’s departure from the band — and its consequent dissolution — had taken place the previous month. A new video for the song “Let It Be” was also released this Friday with never-before-seen takes on the Beatles’ YouTube channel.

“For me it’s a combination of sadness and also happiness, and the film exemplifies that,” said Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to ABC News, about the moment the Beatles were going through at the time of filming, in January 1969.

“Let It Be” was responsible for giving the Beatles the Oscar for best original soundtrack in 1971, but the person who took the stage to collect the award on behalf of the Fab Four was producer Quincy Jones. In the same year, Paul and Linda, his wife, went to receive the Grammy won by the Beatles in the same category.

The restoration was led by Peter Jackson, director of “Get Back” — a documentary miniseries released in 2021 that used raw material from Lindsay-Hogg’s filming. Originally, when they went from 16mm to 35mm to go to theaters, the images became grainy. With the restoration, the images are clear, but Jackson chose to maintain the film’s original framing, unlike the widescreen of “Get Back”.

In his miniseries, Jackson chose to avoid repeating scenes from the original work, except when unavoidable. Therefore, the re-release of Lindsay-Hogg’s film is an opportunity for fans who watched “Get Back” to see new takes of the Beatles, as in the beautiful sequence in which John and Yoko kiss and dance to the sound of “I Me Mine “, played by the other three members of the band.

With the re-release of the film, Disney+ also produced a chat between directors Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Peter Jackson, responsible for the two works.

“I love them four, I really feel love for them like a director often feels love for an actor”, said Lindsay-Hogg, who before the documentary had directed the Beatles in the videos for “Paperback Writer”, “Rain”, “Revolution” and “Hey Jude”.

In recent years, new technologies have helped the Beatles to clean up their history, such as the remixing and remastering of some of their albums. Thus, they end up motivating the creation of new technologies, such as Machine Audio Learning (MAL), created by Peter Jackson’s company, which allows the total separation of audio for later mixing.

The technology, already used in “Get Back”, made it possible to release “Now and Then”, the group’s latest song. Now, it was also used in the restoration of “Let It Be”.

“The two projects support and enhance each other: ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Get Back,’ while ‘Get Back’ provides vital context that ‘Let It Be’ lacks,” said Jackson.

The nearly eight hours of the “Get Back” miniseries make the film feel incomplete in its 80 minutes. In any case, all the merit of Peter Jackson’s revealing work has as its source the work of Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who did not have the same freedom and technology available at the time, but was accurately aware of what was happening around him.

The morning after George Harrison’s abrupt and temporary departure from the band, shown only in “Get Back”, Lindsay-Hogg and Ringo Starr talk at Twickenham Studios about the progress of recording. “Did you get enough for a good documentary?” asks Ringo.

“It depends on how the situation flows,” replies the director. “If we show things as they are, we will have a very good documentary. But if we hide, we won’t have much” — realizing that what had gone wrong in the first days of recording was precisely the most important thing he had at hand.

“Use everything,” recommended Ringo.