The Front Row: “The Hours and Times”

The allure of the Beatles, the band that turned rock universal, is a cultural mystery that the director Christopher Munch boldly and insightfully confronted in his first feature, “The Hours and Times,” from 1991, which I discuss in this clip. Like a scientist, Munch considers the phenomenon in isolation; rather than looking at the band on tour or going behind the scenes of the music industry, he constructs a cinematic petri dish: a dramatization of the four-day jaunt to Barcelona, in 1963, of John Lennon and the group’s manager, Brian Epstein. Filming in black and white, analyzing the action in fluidly composed images, Munch directed a film that, at a casual glance, looks as if it might even be a documentary. The actor Ian Hart’s uncanny impersonation of the young Lennon helps to sustain that illusion, too. Far from being a stunt, Munch’s re-creation of the moment is a kind of intellectual archeology, a rediscovery of states of mind and mood—ones in which Lennon’s explosive sense of freedom, inner and outer, resounded around the world. Munch’s career hasn’t achieved the prominence that his first film promised—but his most recent movie, “Letters from the Big Man,” released in 2011, gets inside the mental world of another modern legend: Sasquatch.