The mystery 1967 ‘music video’ for The Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’

Almost entirely unknown and shrouded in mystery, this three-minute short film is scored to The Beatles’ song ’Penny Lane’ and was made in 1967, the very same year that the song was released on a double A side with ’Strawberry Fields Forever’. Lennon and McCartney’s dual hit was ultimately kept from number one by Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Release Me’, but – if it had been seen more widely – perhaps Ian McMillan’s film could have helped the cause?

Unlike other music films, and indeed later pop videos, Memory wasn’t screened on television, and the circulation of short films was limited to film society and independent cinema events. Shot on 35mm and more traditional in tone than the then current vogue for cut-up, psychedelic underground films, in all likelihood it failed to trouble the Arts Labs and other multimedia happenings slowly popping up around the country, which typically projected 16mm films from a portable projector, juxtaposed with a liquid lightshow.

The Beatles were already in their psychedelic phase when Paul McCartney wrote ‘Penny Lane’, and yet MacMillan adopts a realist, melancholic approach in his modest, delicate film. The streets, houses and shops of Liverpool are brought to life with touching attention to the texture of bricks, buildings, rainwater and sunlight. 

MacMillan had already worked on commercial feature films and had a very different background to those who typically congregated around alternative film in the late 1960s. His previous projects, where he invariably operated the camera, included Basil Wright’s gritty, social problem film Violent Playground (1958). Seen in its recently remastered form, Memory showcases MacMillan’s eye for detail and place – a skill he made the most of over the next 50 years, directing 11 of his own shorts for both cinema and television, and latterly co-headed-up successful advertising agency McMillan and Hughes. He won a Golden Lion at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 1982 for his commercial for John Smith’s bitter.

In 1984, he made a return to the Beatles’ fold, working as the cinematographer on McCartney’s post-MTV music feature film Give My Regards to Broad Street. Whether the pair discussed Memory, we’ll almost certainly never know, but the earlier film’s attention to the texture of daily life, cut in sometimes literal fashion to the song, may have given the musician pause for thought.

Watching Memory today takes us back to the time of its original production and the social dynamics of the 1960s, but we might just as easily think about all the other times the film cans were dusted-off and the three minutes of cut footage were projected, the marks of its biography, at each pass, gently (or not so gently) carved into the emulsion on the print. To see the work digitally is marvellous too: it takes us back to when the film was first made and when prints looked spic and span. Focusing so exclusively on different locales, all but banning actual people from the frame, Memory connects to something out of time. 

Only the fireman and his engine concretely appear as if from some other, long-distant era, and yet the larger look of images captured on film still anchors the work in an out-of-reach past and worlds now otherwise lost. Film itself creates memories, beyond the actual content of them. Film stock, editing styles, even the look of the format – 35mm, 16mm or digital – all contribute to and shape our memories of the past.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.