Lives of Performers: The Films of Yvonne Rainer
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When Film at Lincoln Center presented an Yvonne Rainer retrospective in the summer of 2017, Steve Macfarlane, writing for Hyperallergic, noted that the films of the renowned dancer and choreographer “collapse safe boundaries between maker, work, and audience, not just once or twice (for easy, cathartic effect) but consistently throughout, drawing you back to square one and insisting that you take a long, hard look at your own relationship to the screen—a relationship which, like so many others, Rainer does not let us forget is about power.”
On Friday, February 17, Rainer will be at New York’s Metrograph to take part in a Q&A moderated by Amy Taubin, who can be heard discussing the Red Army Faction, the left-wing militant group active in Germany in the 1970s, with video and performance artist Vito Acconci in Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979). Metrograph will present new restorations of all seven of Rainer’s features as Lives of Performers: The Films of Yvonne Rainer runs through February 26, and the Berlinale will screen The Man Who Envied Women (1985) as part of its Forum Expanded program on February 17 and 25.
The title of the Metrograph series is taken from Rainer’s first feature, Lives of Performers (1972), made when Rainer was in her late thirties and restarting her life after a suicide attempt the previous year. She’d grown up in the Sunset district of San Francisco as the daughter of proudly radical parents, left for New York at the age of twenty-one with the painter Al Held, and studied dance with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. A cofounder of the Judson Dance Theatre, Rainer began choreographing her own pieces in the early 1960s and became, as Erin Brannigan wrote for Senses of Cinema in 2003, “a key figure in the story of the New York avant-garde” with such landmark works as Trio A (1966).
On the screen, the title Lives of Performers is followed by a parenthetical, (a melodrama), and the film is centered on the troubles caused by the indecision of a man torn between two women. “Rainer is continuously searching for some invisible architecture, reasons we might move or behave in the way we do, why a thing is funny to some people, frightening to others,” writes Natasha Stagg in the Metrograph Journal. “Rainer’s feature films purposefully teeter between critique and pastiche, leveraging cliché as base to life’s acid.”
Film About a Woman Who . . . (1974) “throbs with more fury than its predecessor,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2017. “A heady, protean, text-heavy disquisition on sex, jealousy, and betrayal, Rainer’s second film, unlike her first, isn’t limited to the confines of Lower Manhattan apartments or performance spaces; some of the more evocative passages take place on a beach, where a woman and a man (sometimes joined by a child) assume different spatial and psychic configurations. Of course, no locale is more emotionally fraught than a bed, which here dominates an otherwise bare loft and assumes the grandeur of a stage.”
Rainer is among several women who appear as the title character in Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), a hybrid portrait of a woman, a lion tamer from Budapest, who arrives in New York with hopes of becoming a choreographer. Journeys from Berlin features not only Taubin and Acconci but also art and film critic Annette Michelson, who plays a patient undergoing psychoanalysis. Rainer gave her reams of dialogue to memorize and tells Lynne Tillman in the Metrograph Journal that this “was a hard role. I gave her a lot of attention. We were in rehearsal for a year or so. Off and on. She really committed herself to this.”
William Raymond and Larry Loonin take turns playing The Man Who Envied Women, Jack Deller, a womanizing professor whose marriage to an artist (choreographer Trisha Brown) is falling apart. As he rambles on about his sex life, scenes from Hollywood movies play out behind him. “Well,” Rainer told Steve Macfarlane, “these are film noirs—all films about women either putting themselves down or being put down, condescended to, by men. Even after Barbara Stanwyck finally shoots Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, she’s apologizing for it! I was very influenced by my becoming conscious of the role women play in patriarchy. All those films behind Jack reflect that.”
Privilege (1990) “starts as an apparently straightforward documentary, in which Rainer interviews middle-aged women about their experience of menopause,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “But Rainer soon gives herself an onscreen double, Yvonne Washington (played by Novella Nelson), and turns Privilege into a film-within-a-film made by her fictional counterpart. Rainer’s movie is on the front lines of intersectionality (a term coined in 1989 by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw) in its connection of the struggles for the rights of women, African-Americans, homosexuals, the aged, the disabled, and the poor. It’s also aesthetically intersectional in its fusion of cinematic styles.”
In the early 1990s, Rainer was diagnosed with breast cancer and was settling down with a woman she’d fallen in love with. MURDER and murder (1996) is a structurally challenging but also at times playful reflection on these unexpected, life-changing turns. In 1990, Rainer wrote, “My films can be described as autobiographical fictions, untrue confessions, undermined narratives, mined documentaries, unscholarly dissertations, dialogic entertainments.”
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