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YES Yoko Ono
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YOKO ONO
© 2001 Yoko Ono
YES YOKO ONO -
Opening at MFA-MIT
List
Visual Arts Center-
Cambridge, Massachusetts
 |
Yoko
photographed |
The Arts & TV section of the Boston Herald October 20, 2001 edition featured an story about Yoko's films at the YES exhibit opening that weekend at MIT's List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge.
Paul Sherman, in his article titled "Eye on Ono," points out that some of the films being show are Flux film shorts, but the accompanying film series is not always part of the tour. Yoko said, "When the films are asked for, they go, too."
Being shown at MIT are the 1971 "Imagine," "Rape," and "Bed-In" from 1969.
Yoko said, "I was a filmmaker, so I was very serious about it, and I was making films before I met John, so it was just a continuation of that in a way. And John showed me some home movies he was making, and they weren't ordinary home movies where you might see a birthday party. They were very highly surrealistic, like a visual collage. And I thought it was very interesting. In a way, we kind of compared notes about our filmmaking experiences."
Sherman writes, "The Ono-Lennon films often blended the experimental and the political. Like the work of such contemporaries as Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol, the way the movies sometimes broke with tradition could be, in itself, a political statement.
"With 'Rape,' in which a camera crew hits upon a young woman at a cemetery and then won't leave her alone, the statements even went beyond Ono's original intention. Although the movie now plays like a chilling indictment of the invasiveness of celebrity, Ono explained that she conceived of it 'before I became famous. It wasn't the idea of celebrity at the time, it was more to do with the dialogue we have between the outside world and ourselves. In hindsight, it gave me a shock when I saw the film again, after John's passing. I thought it was so prophetic. My life was really getting (invaded) like that. I don't know about those things - there may be prophecies or there might be some sort of instinctive understanding of the future, or maybe we create the future.'"
Yoko said about her films: "They're not just political. I think film was a very experimental medium until MTV came along. (Music videos) basically exploit all sorts of ideas of film form, so in a way film got exhausted. There was no point in doing experimental films anymore."
