A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

has many levels of impactone being politicalbut originally I simply wanted to cover the screen with one object, with something that was moving constantly. In the course of seeing films, I had never seen a film where an object was covering the screen all the way through. There's always a background. The closest you get to what I mean is like some macho guy, a cowboy or something, standing with his back to the screen, but you always see a little background. The screen is never covered; so I thought, if you don't leave a background it might be like the whole screen is moving. I just wanted to have that experience. As you say, it didn't work in the early version, but it was the first idea I had for the film actually.

And also, the juxtaposition of the movement of the four sections of the bottoms was fascinating, I thought.

MacDonald: No. 4 (Bottoms)

reminds me of Eadweard Muybridge's motion photographs.

Ono:

Oh I see, yeah.

MacDonald:

Was the finished film shown a lot?

Ono:

Well, I finally got an OK from the censor and we showed it in Charing Cross Road. Then some American Hollywood producer came and said he wanted to buy it and take it to the United States. Also, he wanted me to make 365 breasts, and I said, if we're going to do breasts, then I will do a sequence of one breast, you know, fill the screen with a single breast over and over, but I don't think that was erotic enough for him. He was thinking eroticism; I was thinking about visual, graphic conceptsa totally different thing. I was too proud to make two breasts [laughter]. I think there was an attempt to take the bottoms film to the United States, but it was promptly confiscated by the censor

MacDonald:

At customs?

Ono:

Yes.

MacDonald:

There's a mention on the sound track that you were planning to do other versions of that film in other countries, and the film

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ends with the phrase, "To Be Continued." Was that a concept for other films, or were there some specific plans for follow-ups?

Ono:

Well you see, all my films do have a conceptual side. I have all these scripts, and I get excited just to show them to people because my hope is that maybe they will want to make some of them. That would be great. I mean most of my films are film instructions; they were never made actually. Just as film instructions, I think they are valid, but it wouldn't be very good if somebody makes them. I don't have to make them myself. And also, each film I made had a projection of future plans built into the idea. If somebody picks up on one of them, that's great.

At the time I was making films, what I felt I was doing was similar to what

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

[1975] did later. I wanted to involve the audience directly in new ways.

MacDonald:

How did

Film No. 5 (Smile)

come about?

Ono:

When I went to London, I still kept thinking about the idea of smile, so when I had the chance, I decided to do my version. Of course, until John and I got together, I could never have rented a high-speed camera. Well, maybe if I'd looked into it, I could have. I don't know, but I thought it would be too expensive.

MacDonald:

Did you know Lennon well at the point when you did

Film No. 5 (Smile)

?

Ono:

Yes.

MacDonald:

Because I wondered whether you made the film because you wanted to capture a certain complexity in him, or whether the complexity that's revealed in that seemingly simple image is a result of what the high-speed camera reveals, or creates, as it films.

Ono:

Well, certainly I knew John was a complex person. But the film wasn't so much about his complexity as a person. I was trying to capture the complexity of a visual experience. What you see in that film is very similar to how you perceive somebody when you are on acid. We had done acid trips together, and that gave me the idea. I wondered how do you capture this?

MacDonald:

It's a beautiful film.

Ono:

Well, of course, you know from the statements I made about

Smile

[See Ono,

Grapefruit,

"On Film No. 5 & Two Virgins"] that my idea was really very different from the film I finally made. My idea was to do

everybody's

smile. But when I met John, I thought, doing

everybody's

smile is going to be impossible; and he can

represent

everybody's smile.

MacDonald:

What I find incredible about

Smile

is that as you watch John's face, it's almost as though you can see his mind working. I don't know whether it's an optical illusion, maybe it's created by the way that the camera works. But it's almost as though as you watch, the expression is changing every second.

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Ono: