Freedom, Fly, and Up Your Legs Forever

In Freedom (Yoko Ono, 1970, 1 min, Color), a short “freedom film” made for the 1971 Chicago Film Festival, Yoko tries to free herself from her brassiere, in slow motion. Fly (1970, 25 mins, Color), like Rape, 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.” Up Your Legs Forever (1970, 70 mins, Color), in the manner of No. 4 (Bottoms), films the legs of over 300 subjects. Compared to Bottoms, the image is positively sculptural, with negative and positive space and a vertically moving camera. Once again the soundtrack is wry, with denizens of the New York avant-garde providing commentary as they “share their legs for peace.” We also hear each model rattle off his or her number to a man who never fails to “thank you very much”; it's a litany picked up by Lennon, who capitalizes on the humorous and vaguely sinister way that repetition and individuality jockey for position in the visuals.

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