Yvonne Rainer

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Yvonne Rainer’s landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger. (Zeitgeist FIlms)Read More »

This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures. Namechecking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, Rainer continues to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature with unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul.Read More »

This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers. Rainer’s debut feature film announced both her shift from the world of dance towards avant-garde cinema, and what would become a career-long interest in “women’s stories” and the teasing machinations of melodrama. The familiar tale of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes everyone suffer is reworked by Rainer as a jolting and radically austere, anti-illusionist spectacle, comprising dance rehearsals, photography, tableaux, and a flurry of fragments of text, both onscreen and not. Off-camera, multiple voices can be heard—including that of cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who was at the time just beginning work with a young Chantal Akerman.Read More »

In an avant-garde attempt to explore widely disparate, unconnected subjects dealing with topics as diverse as sex, a broken marriage, artists’ housing in New York, and Central American politics, director Yvonne Rainer meanders through a lot of philosophical and rhetorical territory. In the end, the voyage may be too much for most viewers, although certain segments of the film stand out as quite successful.Read More »

A stark and revealing examination of romantic alliances, Lives Of Performers examines the dilemma of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes them both suffer. Originally part of a dance performance choreographed by Rainer.
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