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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)
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