A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

is interesting both as an early instance of the serial structuring that was to become so common in avant-garde film by the end of the sixties (in Snow's

Wavelength

and Ernie Gehr's

Serene Velocity,

1970; Hollis Frampton's

Zorns Lemma,

1970 and Robert Huot's

Rolls: 1971,

1972; J. J. Murphy's

Print Generation,

1974 . . .) and because Ono's editing makes the experience of

No. 4 (Bottoms)

more complex than simple descriptions of the film seem to suggest. As the film develops, particular bottoms and comments on the sound track are sometimes repeated, often in new contexts; and a variety of subtle interconnections between image and sound occur.

Like

No. 4 (Bottoms),

Ono's next long film,

Film No. 5 (Smile)

(1968, fifty-one minutes), was an extension of work included in the

Fluxfilm Program

. Like her

Eyeblink

and

Match

and like Chieko Shiomi's

Disappearing Music for Face

(in which Ono's smile gradually "disappears"), also on the

Fluxfilm ProgramFilm No. 5 (Smile)

was shot with a high-speed camera. Unlike these earlier films, all of which filmed simple actions in black and white, indoors, at 2000 frames per second,

Film No. 5 (Smile)

reveals John Lennon's face, recorded at 333 frames per second for an extended duration, outdoors, in color, and accompanied by a sound track of outdoor sounds recorded at the same time the imagery was recorded.

Film No. 5 (Smile)

divides roughly into two halves, one continuous shot each. During the first half, the film is a meditation on Lennon's face, which is so still that on first viewing I wasn't entirely sure for a while that the film was live action and not an optically printed photograph of Lennon smiling slightly. Though almost nothing happens in any conventional sense, the intersection of the high-speed filming and our extended gaze creates continuous, subtle transformations: it is as if we can see Lennon's expression evolve in conjunction with the flow of his thoughts. Well into the first shot, Lennon forms his lips into an "O"a kiss perhapsand then slowly returns to the slight smile with which the shot opens. During the second shot of

Film No. 5 (Smile),

which differs from the first in subtleties of color and texture (both shots

Page 142

are lovely), Lennon's face is more active; he blinks several times, sticks his tongue out, smiles broadly twice, and seems to say "Ah!" Of course, while the second shot is more active than the first, the amount of activity remains minimal by conventional standards (and unusually so even for avant-garde film). It is as though those of us in the theater and Lennon are meditating on each other from opposite sides of the cinematic apparatus, joined together by Ono in a lovely, hypnotic stasis.

The excitement Ono and Lennon were discovering living and working together fueled

Two Virgins

(1968) and

Bed-In

(1969), both of which were collaborations.

Two Virgins

enacts two metaphors for the two artists' interaction. First, we see a long passage of Ono's and Lennon's faces superimposed, often with a third layer of leaves, sky, and water; then we see an extended shot of Ono and Lennon looking at each other, then kissing.

Bed-In

is a relatively conventional record of the Montreal performance; it includes a number of remarkable moments, most noteworthy among them, perhaps, Al Capp's blatantly mean-spirited, passive-aggressive visit, and the song "Give Peace a Chance." Nearly all of Ono's remaining films were collaborations with John Lennon.

When the Whitney Museum presented Ono's films at its 1989 retrospective,

Rape

(1969) provoked the most extensive critical commentary. The relentless seventy-seven-minute feature elaborates the single action of a small filmmaking crew coming upon a woman in a London park and following her through the park, along streets, and into her apartment where she becomes increasingly isolated by her cinematic tormentors. (Her isolation is a theme from the beginning since the woman speaks German; because the film isn't subtitled, even

we

don't know what she's saying in any detail.) The film was, according to Ono, a candid recording by cinematographer Nic Knowland of a woman who was not willingly a part of this project. When

Rape

was first released, it was widely seen as a comment on Ono's experience of being in the media spotlight with Lennon. Two decades later, the film seems more a parable about the implicit victimization of women by the institution of cinema.

Fly

(1970) has a number of historical precedentsWillard Maas's

Geography of the Body