Sensory reaction in the works of Ono and Brakhage

This paper explores how experimental cinema reconfigures the viewer’s sensory relationship with the human body through the works of Stan Brakhage and Yoko Ono. Both Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Four (1967) challenge the conventions of cinematic viewing by replacing narrative and symbolism with direct sensory engagement. Brakhage immerses the viewer in the raw, luminous immediacy of childbirth, transforming the act of looking into a tactile experience—a “cinema of flesh” that allows the eye to feel as much as it sees. In contrast, Ono’s repetitive, detached framing of anonymous bodies in Four resists pleasure and forces the viewer to confront the discomfort and alienation of prolonged observation. Drawing on theorists such as Laura Marks, Susan Sontag, and Béla Balázs, the essay explores how both artists redefine the relationship between film and embodiment. Through intensity and restraint, intimacy and distance, Brakhage and Ono turn spectatorship into a physical encounter—making the viewer not just witness the human body, but sense their own act of seeing it.

Works Cited

Balázs, Béla. Visible Man, or The Culture of Film. 1924. In The Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Berghahn Books, 2010.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Window Water Baby Moving. 1959. Stan Brakhage: By Brakhage—An Anthology, Volume One,The Criterion Collection, 2003.

Ono, Yoko, director. Four. 1967. Fluxfilm Anthology, curated by George Maciunas, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1970.

Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film. Manchester University Press, 2014.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.