A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

or maybe not, maybe it's one of the instructions that haven't been published [Ono is referring to the second version of her film script, "Film No. 1 (A Walk to the Taj Mahal)"]. There was a constant feeling of wanting to take an object that's on the groundnot necessarily an object, could be a personin fact the original idea was a drunken guy walking in a snowy field; you don't see the drunken guy, but the camera suggests that he's drunk because of the way it moves. So he walks and sways, and finally the camera goes up in the sky. When we did the cover for the "Two Virgins" album, where we were both naked, one of us said, "Why don't we make a film where the camera moves from the ground up, shooting our naked bodies, and then just goes up in the air." Later, John said, "Well, let's make one where the camera goes up.'' So the idea stemmed from that. What happened, of course, was that we didn't expect the balloon film to be the way it turned out. We went up in the balloon, and it happened to be a snowy day.

MacDonald:

You were in the balloon with the camera?

Ono:

Up to a certain point. The part where you go into the cloud, and then break out of the cloud, was taken later. The footage that came back from the lab was beautiful. It was just something that happened naturally, the dogs barking, everything that happenedit was an incredible experience. We didn't expect it was going to be that beautiful. A lot of things just happen, you know.

MacDonald:

If you allow them to, I guess.

Ono:

Yes!

MacDonald: Fly

seems almost the opposite of

Apotheosis

in a way; it seems . . .

Page 154

Ono:

Very much intentionally calculated?

MacDonald:

Right.

Ono:

It's true.

MacDonald:

You did the sound [for the vocal piece

Fly

] before you did the film. Had you had the idea in mind then?

Ono:

I was always thinking about the idea of fly. Actually, I was always fascinated with the pun "fly" and "fly" in English. There was also a conceptual event about flies and where they fly to.

MacDonald:

The piece you did for the Museum of Modern Art?

Ono:

Yes. Did you see that Museum of Modern Art catalogue? [A 112-page, one foot by one foot cataloguethe title seems to be

Museum of Modern FArt

(Ono is carrying a shopping bag with the letter "F" directly beneath the Museum of Modern Art marquee)which details her concept at length; the catalogue was designed by Ono and produced by Michael Gross.] At the end of that, I talk about how to fly.

MacDonald:

I know the video with the sandwich-board guy in front of the Museum of Modern Art who interviews people about the Yoko Ono show that "isn't there" [

The Museum of Modern Art Show

]. In the text for that piece, you explain how some flies were exposed to your perfume and let loose and that people are following those flies around to see where they land.

Ono:

The catalogue was made for that event; it had all sorts of interesting stuff in it, about how to fly and all that. All the pages are postcards that you could mail, so the catalogue and

Fly

piece could fly all over the place.

MacDonald:

So MoMA had this on sale?

Ono:

No, no, no, no! MoMA would not do it. MoMA was busy saying to people, "There's no Yoko Ono show here." People would come in and ask, is there a Yoko Ono show, and they would say

no

. They were very upset; they didn't know what was going on. I couldn't sell the book anywhere. Nobody bought it, so I have piles of it.

MacDonald:

Earlier, in the mid sixties, you did a number of descriptions of environmental boxes that the viewer would go inside of and images would be projected on the outside.

Eyeblink

was involved in a number of those descriptions, and another was called "Fly." I guess the idea was that a viewer would go inside the box and on all sides you would project images that would create the sensation that the viewer was flying.

Ono:

How do you know about these boxes?

MacDonald:

I found the descriptions in the

Fluxus Codex,

in the Yoko Ono section [See Jon Hendricks,

Fluxus Codex

(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), p. 418 for the descriptions]. Was either piece ever built?

Page 155

Ono:

They were never built. I haven't seen these ideas since I did them. Whenever I had an idea, I sent it to George Maciunas. He probably kept them. I don't even have the originals for those. I'll have to get this book. You know, I have this thing about reading about me. When something about me is in a book, I mostly don't want to know about it.

MacDonald:

One of the interesting things about watching the film

Fly

is that one's sense of what the body we're seeing is about, and what the film is about, is constantly changing.

Ono: