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Aisumasen (I'm Sorry) (Ultimate Mix) - 1973 Portapak home video filmed by John Lennon

Published on Thu, Jun 27th 2024 Entertainment Rectangular HD

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In May 1973, three months before work would begin on John Lennon's Mind Games album, John & Yoko moved into their newly purchased apartment in the Dakota building on West 72nd Street, high above Central Park and with a beautiful view over the area that would later be dedicated to John and named Strawberry Fields, where the now world-famous 'Imagine' circle mosaic now resides.

In this video - with footage entirely filmed by John Lennon in black and white on an early Sony Portapak camera and reel-to-reel recorder, we see Yoko giving interviews for her well-received Approximately Infinite Universe album, John filming himself (and the camera) in a mirror in the bedroom, playing in the Music Room with a transistor radio, and various views in and around their new apartment and out of the sash windows and through the railings ('Rear Window'/'The Conversation'-style) capturing people walking in Central Park and on W72nd Street.

Featured inside the apartment are Yoko's artworks Forget It, 1966, Wrapping Piece, 1966, a poster from her exhibition This Is Not Here at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, 1971, a Sohmer & Co. Cabinet Grand upright piano, her Fender Rhodes Seventy Three keyboard, a harmonium, various percussion instruments and a host of their recording and playback equipment. Also in evidence is their TV with a 24 hour rolling text news service - ten years before the birth of the internet - and bookshelves full of their current reading materials and a polaroid portrait of Yoko by John he called 'the real deal'.

It was a period of great upheaval. Yoko had been awarded custody of her ten-year old daughter Kyoko, who had then disappeared - unbeknownst to them abducted by her father Tony Cox into hiding in a religious cult. John & Yoko were in the process of ending their relations with Allen Klein, Joko Films and Elephant's Memory and looking for pastures new. The war continued in Vietnam, the troubles continued in Ireland and John was fighting with Immigration for his right to stay in the USA - a landmark case he would eventually win, paving the way for many more creative people to legally work in the country.

Despite the legal battle with immigration, John & Yoko both continued their optimistic manifestations - peacefully protesting against the wars and campaigning for feminism, attending the National Organisation of Women's First International Feminist Planning Conference in June at Harvard where Yoko had previously studied.