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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
(1943), most obviouslybut it remains powerful and fascinating. At first, a fly is seen, in extreme close-up, as it "explores" the body of a nude woman (she's identified as "Virginia Lust" in the credits); later more and more flies are seen crawling on the body, which now looks more like a corpse; and at the end, the camera pans up and "flies" out the window of the room. The remarkable sound track is a combination of excerpts from Ono's vocal piece,
Fly,
and music composed by Lennon.
Up Your Legs Forever (1970)
is basically a remake of
No. 4 (Bottoms),
using legs, rather than buttocks: the camera continually pans up