3rd Nov 2011 Harrison's 'Living In The Material World'

Within the frame of Festival of Musical Documentary 'In Edit', one of the germs projected this season is George Harrison's 'Living in the material world', an rapprochement of the veteran movie maker Martin Scorsese, depicting the renowned figure of the 'Beatles' died 10 years ago.

The film, more than 3 hours, is not a minute too long. It roams along the life and work of the musician from his incorporation, in his adolescence, to the group of Lennon & McCarthy, till his death at the age of 58, victim of cancer. But, more than anything else, it's a very interesting revision of the phenomenal Pop through one of the most genuine saints.

 

In the numerous old images, songs and testimonies included in the documentary, it surprises how close the sensibility of 'The Beatles' still evokes today, and how far away the 'Flower Age' was; the eternal youth, LSD and meditation in the shade of the Taj Mahal.

In some way, The Pop culture amongst us is all it's strength, but the social ambience that surrounded it's explosion has but completely dissolved. Listening today 'Here comes the sun', one of the most beautiful input of Harrison to The Beatles, still produces enormous pleasure to enjoy a song energetically optimistic, a declaration of unwavering hope, one of the twilight Hymns of the happy and carefree 60's. It provokes also uneasiness knowing, that it formed part of a brilliant history that ended sadly.

 

The sun came down years later when John Lennon was assassinated. Today, several wars and millions of unemployment later, with the society more unequal than ever before, no sensible youths compose similar songs.

Footnote: It seems frivolity or triviality to write of anything today but the precarious situation of Greece, or of the political crisis in Europe, but remember, that the song 'Here comes the sun' was edited within the Album 'Abbey Road' in 1969, governed then in Athens by the pinnacle crown, dictatorship that, amongst many other atrocities, prohibited 'The Beatles'.

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