A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

was made, the idea of showing a lot of asses was completely outrageous. Bottoms were a less-respected, less-revealed part of the anatomy. These days things have changed. Now bottoms are OKcertain bottoms. What I found exhilarating about watching the film (maybe because I've always been insecure about

my

bottom!) is that after you see hundreds of bottoms, you realize that during the whole time you watched the film, you never saw the "cor-

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rect," marketable jean-ad bottom. You realize that nobody's bottom is the way bottoms are supposed to be: they droop, or there are pimplessomething is "wrong." I think the film has almost as much impact now as it did thenthough in a different way.

Ono:

Well, you see, it's not just to do with bottoms. For me the film is less about bottoms than about a certain beat, a beat you didn't see in films, even in avant-garde films, then.

This is something else, but I remember one beautiful film where the stationary camera just keeps zooming toward a wall . . .

MacDonald: Wavelength?

Michael Snow's film?

Ono:

Right, Michael Snow. That's an incredibly beautiful film, a revolution in itself really. Bottoms film was a different thing, but just as revolutionary I think. It was about a beat, about movement. The beat in bottoms film is comparable to a rock beat. Even in the music world there wasn't that beat until rock came. It's the closest thing to the heartbeat. I tried to capture that again with

Up Your Legs Forever

. But in

No. 4 (Bottoms)

it worked much better. Maybe it was the bottoms. That film has a

basic

energy. I couldn't capture it in

Up Your Legs Forever

.

MacDonald: No. 4 (Bottoms)

plays with perceptions and memory in different ways. For a while it seems like a simple, serial structure, one bottom after another. Then at a certain point you realize, Oh I've seen that bottom before . . . but was it with this sound? No, I don't think so. Later you may see another bottom a second time, clearly with the same sound. A new kind of viewing experience develops. Did you record all the bottoms and the spoken material for the track, and then later, using that material, develop a structure? It seems almost scored.

Ono:

Yes. I spent a lot of hours editing. It wasn't just put together. The sequence was important. A sympathetic studio said that I could come at midnight or whenever no one was using the facilities, to do the editing. I got a lot of editing time free; that's how I was able to finish it.

MacDonald:

On the sound track some of the participants talk about the process of getting people to show up to have their bottoms recorded, but I'm not completely sure what the process was. You put an ad in a theatrical paper apparently.

Ono:

Well, we had an ad, yes, but most of the people were friends of friends. It became a fantastic event. You have to understand, the minute the announcement was made, there was a new joke about it in the newspapers everyday, and everybody was into it. We filmed at Victor Musgrave's place; he was a very good friend who was very generous in letting me use his townhouse.

MacDonald:

Did you select bottoms or did you use everybody that was filmed? Were there really 365 bottoms involved?

Ono:

I didn't select bottoms. There was not enough for 365 anyway.

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And the impact of the film as a happening was already getting lost from filming for so long. And there was the rental of the camera and the practical aspect of the shooting schedule. At a certain point I just said, "Oh well, the number's conceptual anyway, so who cares. It's enough!"

MacDonald:

I assume that when you did the early Fluxus version of

No. 4,

you just followed people walking across an apartment. For the long film you'd built a machine to do the filming, which allowed you to film in more controlled close-up; we can't see around the sides of the bodies the way we can in the earlier film.

Ono:

Well, in the first

No. 4

I was pretty close too. But, as you say, it wasn't really perfect. In London we did it almost perfectly. My idea both times was very visual. All my films had very visual concepts behind them in the beginning. I mean

No. 4 (Bottoms)