Fly (1970, 25 mins, Color, 16 mm) explores the idea (as well as the fact) of the female body on screen. The p.o.v. of the proverbial fly-on-the-wall is literalized as a fly (fly/camera) explores the naked body of a woman, lying prone. One of Ono and Lennon's most beautiful films, it is also a musical, with fly songs-the high-pitched sounds typical of Ono's music finding their natural niche-accompanying a sort of fly-meets-fly story as first one, then two, then several flies converge on the model's body. Ono conceived of Fly as a film about the spectator: “I wondered how many people would look at the fly or at the body.”

To make Rape (1969, 77 mins, Color, 16mm), Ono's cameraman Nic Knowland with his camera picked up a woman in a London cemetery and pursued her, relentlessly, through the streets, into a friend's flat and finally to her own place. Speaking only German and Italian, she can neither discern why she is being filmed nor make her stalkers go away; other women appear to be accomplices. She becomes frantic. Usually interpreted as a realization in the extreme of the paparazzi syndrome, Rape speaks (rather screams) to the cinema, as well. And specifically, of woman as she is captured in the cinema-her inability to communicate from “behind the screen,” pursued by a (phallic) lens and microphone, the camera so close as to refuse the whole picture, a cameraman whose silence is power. Sure, she could have sat back and enjoyed it, but that would have been a different film.