A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Except as a film-goer, Ono was not involved with film until the 1960s, though by the time she began to make her own films, she was an established artist. At the end of the fifties, after studying poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College, she became part of a circle of avant-garde musicians (including John Cage and Merce Cunningham): in fact the "Chambers Street Series," an influential concert series organized by LaMonte Young, was held at Ono's loft at 112 Chambers. Ono's activities in music led to her first public concert,

A Grapefruit in the World of Park

(at the Village Gate, 1961) and later that same year to an evening of performance events at Carnegie Hall, including

A Piece for Strawberries and Violins

in which Yvonne Rainer stood up and sat down before a table stacked with dishes for ten minutes, then smashed the dishes "ac-

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companied by a rhythmic background of repeated syllables, a tape recording of moans and words spoken backwards, and by an aria of high- pitched wails sung by Ono" (Barbara Haskell's description in

Yoko Ono: Objects, Films,

the catalogue for the 1989 Whitney Museum show).

In the early sixties Ono was part of what became known as Fluxus, an art movement with roots in Dada, in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and energized by George Maciunas. The Fluxus artists were dedicated to challenging conventional definitions in the fine arts, and conventional relationships between artwork and viewer. In the early sixties, Ono made such works as

Painting to See the Room Through

(1961), a canvas with an almost invisible hole in the center through which one peered to see the room, and

Painting to Hammer a Nail In

(1961), a white wood panel that "viewers" were instructed to hammer nails into with an attached hammer. Instructions for dozens of these early pieces, and for later ones, are reprinted in Ono's

Grapefruit,

which has appeared several times in several different editionsmost recently in a Simon and Schuster/Touchstone paperback edition, reprinted in 1979.

By the mid sixties, Ono had become interested in film, as a writer of mini film scripts (sixteen are reprinted in the Fall 1989

Film Quarterly

), and as a contributor of three films to the

Fluxfilm Program

coordinated by Maciunas in 1966: two one-shot films shot at 2000 frames per second,

Eyeblink

and

Match,

and

No. 4,

a sequence of buttocks of walking males and females. Along with several other films in the

Fluxfilm Program

(and two 1966 films by Bruce Baillie),

Eyeblink

and

No. 4

are, so far as I know, the first instances of what was to become a mini-genre of avant-garde cinema: the single-shot film (films that are or appear to be precisely one shot long).

No. 4

is interesting primarily as a sketch for her first long film, No. 4 (

Bottoms

) (1966).

For the eighty minutes of

No. 4 (Bottoms),

all we see are human buttocks in the act of walking, filmed in black and white, in close-up, so that each buttocks fills the screen: the crack between the cheeks and the crease between hams and legs divide the frame into four approximately equal sectors; we cannot see around the edges of the walking bodies. Each buttocks is filmed for a few seconds (often for fifteen seconds or so; sometimes for less than ten seconds), and is then followed immediately by the next buttocks. The sound track consists of interviews with people whose buttocks we see and with other people considering whether to allow themselves to be filmed; they talk about the project in general, and they raise the issue of the film's probable boredom, which becomes a comment on viewers' actual experience of the film. The sound track also includes segments of television news coverage of the project (which had considerable visibility in London in 1966), including an interview with Ono, who discusses the conceptual design of the film.

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No. 4 (Bottoms)

is fascinating and entertaining, especially in its revelation of the human body. Because Ono's structuring of the visuals is rigorously serial,

No. 4 (Bottoms)

is reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, though in this instance the "grid" against which we measure the motion is temporal, as well as implicitly spatial: though there's no literal grid behind the bottoms, each bottom is framed in precisely the same way. What we realize from seeing these bottoms, and inevitably comparing them with one anotherand with our idea of "bottom"is both obvious and startling. Not only are people's bottoms remarkably varied in their shape, coloring, and texture, but no two bottoms move in the same way.

On a more formal level

No. 4 (Bottoms)