Page 151
Ono:
We always maintained careful control over the finished films. I was generally in charge of editing, which I did for that film, and for others, frame by frame. I mean I would have a film editor working with meI don't know the technologybut I would be very specific about what I wanted. When Jonas [Mekas] did the John and Yoko screenings at Anthology [Anthology Film Archives], I had three editing machines and editors brought into our hotel room, and I edited
Bed-In
there because of the deadline.
I enjoy the editing part of filmmaking most of all; that's where the films really get made.
MacDonald: Rape
is often talked about as a parable of the media intruding into your lives, but when I saw it again the other week, it struck me as very similar to pieces in
Grapefruit
.
Ono:
Well, they keep saying that. I'll tell you what happened. By the time that I actually got to make the film, John and I were together, and the reporters were hounding us, but the
Rape
concept was something that I thought of before John and I got together.
MacDonald:
In
Grapefruit
there's "Back Piece II," a part of which is "Walk behind a person for four hours."
Ono:
It was that kind of thing, right. But it was also a film script ["Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)"].
MacDonald:
How candid is the
Rape
footage? It no longer
looks
candid to me.
Ono:
It was completely candidexcept for the effects we did later in the editing. The girl in the film did not know what was happening. Her sister was in on it, so when she calls her sister on the phone, her sister is just laughing at her and the girl doesn't understand why. Nic Knowland did the actual shooting. I wasn't there. Everything was candid, but I kept pushing him to bring back better material. The type of material he brought back at first was something like he would be standing on the street, and when a group of girls passed by, he would direct the camera to them. The girls would just giggle and run away, and he wouldn't follow. I kept saying he could do better than that, but he actually had a personal problem doing the film because he was a Buddhist and a peacenik: he didn't want to intrude on people's privacy. I remember John saying later that no actress could have given a performance that real.
I've done tons of work, and I don't have time to check it all out, but I wish I could check about this strange thing, which is that a lot of my works have been a projection of my future fate. It frightens me. It simply frightens me. I don't want to see
Rape
now. I haven't seen the
Rape
film in a long time, but just thinking about the concept of it frightens me because now I'm in that position, the position of the woman in the film.