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| Jan Hovers, a former broadcaster employee, had the unseen footage in his cellar for decades, not knowing it was the only copyView photos |
Former broadcaster employee Jan Hovers, had the unseen footage of John Lennon (L) and Yoko Ono (2nd L) in his cellar for decades, not knowing it was the only copy
Fifty years
after John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously staged a honeymoon "bed-in"
for peace in an Amsterdam hotel, a Dutchman has unearthed 30 minutes of colour
footage of the event from his cellar.
The couple
spent a week mostly under the sheets at the Hilton hotel to spread a pacifist
message -- smoking, eating, singing and playing guitar while receiving
journalists for interviews.
The
European leg of their honeymoon, which included an unusual press conference in
Vienna with the glamour pair obscured inside a giant "bag", was a
huge media event -- each step captured by photographers and videographers.
This
included a Dutch team shooting footage for a two-part, 84-minute documentary, a
kind of video diary filmed at the pair's request.
It was
broadcast only once, shortly after the honeymoon, and shown at the Edinburgh
Film Festival the same year before disappearing into the archives of
broadcaster KRO, where Jan Hovers was employed in the 1980s.
During a
major cleanup of used film reels, he stumbled upon a tin marked: "Mr &
Mrs Lennon's Honeymoon" among others earmarked for the rubbish heap.
"I
asked if I could keep it and they said: 'No problem, it will all be destroyed
anyway'," Hovers told the Nieuwsuur current affairs programme broadcast
Sunday.
He said he
watched the footage with great pleasure, but then "forgot about it".
"I
never thought it could be unique material. I thought it was a copy. There was
no internet of course, so one could not check."
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| The couple spent a week mostly underthe sheets at the Hilton to spread a pacifist message |
As
Amsterdam marks the 50th anniversary of the unusual honeymoon, a former
colleague remembered that Hovers had once mentioned the find to him.
The
colleague "knocked on the door and said: 'Didn't you have a film of John
and Yoko from the time?' Only then did I fetch it from the cellar," Hovers
said.
'Very
special'
Lennon,
co-founder, singer, and songwriter for the Beatles, married Ono in Gibraltar in
1969. He was shot dead in New York in 1980.
Lennon and
Beatles biographer Mark Lewinsohn told Nieuwsuur he had no idea the footage
existed until now and described it as "very special".
"It's
a great addition to the archive... It's another half-an-hour of film of John
Lennon and Yoko Ono that will tell us things that will make us more informed
and better appreciate what they did."
The
footage, parts of it broadcast by Nieuwsuur, shows the couple in long, white
pyjamas in their bed on different days, with two large posters reading
"Hair Peace" and "Bed Peace" sellotaped to the hotel window
behind them.
In one
part, Lennon is sitting in bed playing guitar as Ono looks on, in one they are
eating, and in another we see the pair from the back, sitting up the bed as
they switch off the light to go to sleep.
After their
Amsterdam sojourn, the couple flew to Vienna for a press conference where they
spoke to reporters from within a large bag.
Footage of
their plane journey to the Austrian capital is on the tape, including some of
the press scrums the pair were constantly confronted with.
"We're
serious about the peace bit you know," Lennon is heard saying towards the
end of the programme. "If we make people laugh, that's enough, you
know."
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