Alannah Coleman at Heal's Gallery, London 1963 (c) Clay Perry/England & Co.
In 2022, I published a biography on the Australian-born art dealer, curator and gallerist Alannah Coleman (1918-1998). Since then I have been waiting for the opportunity to look at her bottom. Even now I cannot be sure that I have seen it since it is only one of the many bottoms in Yoko Ono's FILM NO. 4 ('BOTTOMS'), currently screening at Tate Modern.
Alannah was introduced to Yoko Ono in London by her friend Peter Sheldon Williams (A. Oscar). Victor Musgrove (another friend of Alannah) became involved as director in a film concept that Yoko was putting together. FILM NO. 4 (1966/7), better known as 'BOTTOMS', was a feature-length film of the moving buttocks of 365 people. Produced by Yoko's husband Toy Cox, Yoko later explained:
I wanted to make a film [in which] there's no background. By doing this, that becomes a form instead of part of the form … also I like the idea that it has four sections and, when it's walking, each four sections moving in a different way. … When you listen to the Bottoms film, you get a whole picture of what was in London – intellectuals, what they were thinking – because most of them are very intellectual to, you know, have to take your, you know, clothes off and show their butt. I mean, that's not something that, you know, you can easily do. It wasn't just anybody.’
A still image from Yoko Ono's FILM NO. 4 ('BOTTOMS') (c) Yoko Ono
Alannah was delighted to have her bottom included in the film; after all, it was not so very different to the fashion parades that she had taken part in in Sydney in the 1950s when she had ‘performed’, albeit clothed in the latest fashions. Moreover, Yoko had been very discerning in her choice of bottom – these were the bottoms of London’s free-thinking intellectual art world. When Alannah’s husband John Newell enquired why he had not been included in the film, he received the crushing put-down from Yoko that his bottom was ‘not sensitive enough’. The film was premiered in 1967 at a late night screening at the Jacey Tatler Cinema in Charing Cross Road, a venue for 'continental' (i.e. soft porn type) films. Alannah remembered that much of the audience dozed off during the screening. 'BOTTOMS' was initially banned in the U.K., but following a protest led by Yoko Ono outside the offices of the British Board of Film Censors, the film was given an X rating and screened in selected cinemas. The Listener wrote of:
... Yoko Ono's beautifully absurd film of 15 second shots of bare behinds moving. Not only do you see people literally caught with their pants down, but you hear them with their mental pants down too.
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