An evening with Yoko Ono

Imagine her, just a child, receiving her first piano lesson before knowing how to read and write. 

Imagine her, at 23, when she drops out of a prestigious women’s college, on the advice of a music professor who takes her interest in avant-garde music seriously and tells her that the New York scene of the moment, not the classical curriculum, would benefit her more.

Imagine her, only five years later, performing for the first time at the Carnegie Recital Hall, with Yvonne Rainer who stands and sits repeatedly in front of a table stacked with dishes before smashing them all, while she sings an aria that dissolves into “many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with jibberish [sic] of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all,” as a bewildered critic observed.

By the time Yoko Ono began to make her own films in the second half of the 1960s, she was already an established artist. A prominent member of Fluxus, it was through that connection that she made her first film pieces. Shot for a FluxFilm Programme with a high-speed camera George Maciunas got hold of in 1966, these single-shot pieces belong to a small but distinctive tendency within the avant-garde. The film listed as ONE (1966) in programmes comes out of this constellation.

Her second film out of that programme is Eyeblink (1966). A micro-event is imbued with a sense that even a minimal gesture can carry erotic charge, or nervousness, or simple corporeal presence depending on how we project onto it. Crop the body closely enough and every fragment becomes equally strange and equally susceptible to our fantasies.

Commissioned for television, Rape (1969) is a 60-minute film that marks a brutal expansion of this logic. The cinematographer follows a woman chosen arbitrarily, through streets and stairwells, the camera’s pursuit becoming a kind of psychic siege. By withholding verbal meaning from the viewer, the pressure of the camera and crew is exacerbated, as is the progressive stripping away of the woman’s sense of security. Ono has repeatedly linked the film back to earlier instruction pieces – “follow someone for four hours” – but by the time Rape is made, she herself is being hounded by the media. Seen today, the film reads not only as a potential response to that harassment, but also as a broader indictment of the way cinema has traditionally positioned women as objects to be hunted, cornered, and exposed.

Where Rape anatomises the violence of the gaze, Fly (1970) reverses the scale and lets the body become a landscape. The roughly 37-minute film begins with an extreme close-up of a single fly moving slowly across the skin of a nude woman; gradually more flies join, until the body looks less like a living figure than a strangely vulnerable terrain. Ono has described wanting the viewer to be unsure if they are following the movement of the insect or the contours of the body, caught between fascination and self-deception about what they are “really” looking at. The soundtrack, combining Ono’s voice from the Fly album with music by Lennon, shifts mood with the image: playful, anxious, mournful. At the end the camera finally abandons the body, releasing the viewer – but only after we have sat with the ambiguity of intimacy, eroticism and abjection far longer than narrative cinema ever allows.

Freedom (1970), the very short film in which Ono struggles to remove her bra is made the same year. Its one-minute structure is almost a jest, and yet the jest cuts deep: “freedom” is presented as an attempt that never quite succeeds. The straps snag, time runs out, the body remains held in place. In combination with Fly and Rape, the film makes a small, precise argument about how bodies – especially female bodies – are looked at, harassed, eroticised, and how limited the promise of liberation can feel when the camera is always already there.

Seen together, these five films sketch a compact history of Ono’s film practice between 1966 and 1970. Ono’s remark, “the world is getting smaller and smaller,” should be understood against a backdrop of continuous cultural translation of the time and Ono’s particular predicament of straddling several cultural frameworks. Her films move from micro-durations to endurance and back again, tracing a shift from works made within the orbit of Fluxus to films produced under the unforgiving glare of countercultural celebrity, without ever abandoning the conceptual rigour of the early event scores. Her films show the way attention can function as a powerful form of assembly. 

Aleksandra Jeglińska