Yoko Ono
Fly

Yoko Ono.

Many think that without John Lennon she would have been an ordinary woman without the fame she has now. She would have participated in her conceptual experimentalism groups, with her Fluxus...

Perhaps. It may be that if she had never met the famous Beatle, Yoko Ono might not be known by anyone.

And if she is known now, it's certainly not for her art, if you can call it that: often pretentious, other times extreme, other yet spot-on. Her unconscious attempt in music, with the shrill voice, with highs and lows has entered the dialogues of many people around the globe. Because maybe the no longer young Japanese woman did not have a real talent for music, but she managed to make some good contributions (how can one forget "Walking On Thin Ice," "Open Your Box" or "Kiss Kiss Kiss").

Even more extreme and controversial is her extravagant conception of cinema and image: her visual work.

"Fly" is a short film, dated 1970, which also gives its name to her very difficult double album and shows us, with a seductive and hovering camera, the movements of a fly (and then of many) gently walking over the naked body of a beautiful naked woman. The camera has no shame: it captures everything, without shying away from prolonged sequences on the pubis, on the vagina. All with stark rawness, while in the background the moans of an orgasmic Yoko Ono make it all the more disorienting.

A difficult fresco of creativity that wants to be Dadaist, but proves to be disturbing, almost necrophiliac in the sick atmosphere that it manages to describe. Twenty-five minutes that are hard to endure, where the greatest emotion of the viewer can be translated into a prolonged dumbfounded expression. Incredibly, it manages to express the feeling of death and its rawness in a shocking but effective way. And this sensation is transmittable to the viewer like a slap.

Hard to define. Hard to rate, "Fly" is a film that knows no middle ground: you either love it or hate it. It's either a 1 or a 5. I, undecided between the two extremes, refrain from rating.

^_^