Yoko Ono/John Lennon | Rape poster

Yoko Ono and John Lennon

Rape poster

Austria: Piller-Druck, 1969

59 x 42 cm.

Edition size unknown

In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon directed Film No. 6 (Rape or Chase), a 77-minute-long colour film  based on an earlier film score of Ono's (and a short text in Grapefruit).  

The film had its world premiere on ORF, an Austrian national public service broadcaster, on March 31, 1969. 

Rape, as it's more commonly known, shows the increasingly disturbing pursuit of a young woman by a camera crew. It remains the most controversial of the pair's film output, which includes close ups of bottoms (Film No.4) , flies on a naked woman's body (Fly) and Lennon's erection (Self-Portrait).

Writing for the The Evening Standard, Willie Frischauer declared "This film does for the age of television what Franz Kafka’s The Trial did for the age of totalitarianism."

It was initially assumed that the film was intended as commentary on the paparazzi following the pair, but Lennon clarified at the time: “We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn’t just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere.”

The actress, Eva Rhodes, opened an animal sanctuary in the late nineties in her native Hungary, partially funded with a donation from Ono. An employee of the sanctuary murdered her in 2008, burying her body in the woods after first attempting to burn her corpse. 

“ …The concept of the film, the theme of the film, the instructions of the film, was created before I went into this strange exploitative atmosphere. In other words, I made the instructions before John and I got together. Isn’t that weird? That I would think of a filmic idea like that without knowing what I’m going to get into? And when I saw the film after John’s passing, because I had to put it in some festival somewhere, I got chills. I was describing the life I was going to be in without knowing it.”

– Yoko Ono, Goldmine, November 7, 1997

“It was completely candid- except for the effects we did later in the editing. The girl in the film did not know what was happening. Her sister was in on it, so when she calls her sister on the phone, her sister is just laughing at her and the girl doesn’t understand why. Nic Knowland did the actual shooting. I wasn’t there. Everything was candid, but I kept pushing him to bring back better material. The type of material he brought back at first was something like he would be standing on the street, and when a group of girls passed by, he would direct the camera to them. The girls would just giggle and run away, and he wouldn’t follow. I kept saying he could do better than that, be he actually had a personal problem doing the film because he was a Buddhist and a peacenik – he didn’t want to intrude on people’s privacy. I remember John saying later that no actress could have given a performance that real.

I’ve done tons of work, and I don’t have time to check it all out, but I wish I could check about this strange thing, which is that a lot of my works have been a projection of my future fate. It frightens me. It simply frightens me. I don’t want to see Rape now. I haven’t seen the Rape film in a long time, but just thinking about the concept of it frightens me because now I’m in that position, the position of the woman in the film."

– Yoko Ono, A Critical Cinema by Scott McDonald