[The Daily] Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer

“Yvonne Rainer stands as one of the most influential choreographers of the past fifty-plus years,” begins Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “In 1962 she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, that exalted wellspring of experimental movement; a decade later, she would emerge as a similarly innovative filmmaker. Her seven feature-length works, made between 1972 and 1996, are key entries in avant-garde, post-structuralist, and feminist cinema. . . . Organized by Thomas Beard, Talking Pictures—Rainer’s first retrospective in the city since 2004—also includes, among other works, her shorts, and movies that inspired her; the artist, now 82, will take part in a conversation about her filmmaking with writer Lynne Tillman on July 24.”

The series opens on Friday and runs through July 27 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. What’s more, the exhibition Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955 – 1972 is on view at the New York Public Library through September 16.

“When she returned to dance in the 1990s,” writes Apollinaire Scherr in the Financial Times, Rainer “took on the modernist lodestones Rite of Spring and Agon as well as her own decrepitude in typically layered, disjunctive and comic fashion. Despite this substantial body of work, Rainer’s renown mainly rests on a single five-minute dance. Since its premiere in 1966, Trio A has been performed almost continuously—as a solo and by a crowd; in silence and to wood slats clattering on to the stage from a balcony; in street clothes and with an American flag tied around the neck like a bib; and now as David Michalek’s video installation SlowDancing/TrioA in the unlit sanctuary of St Mark’s Church in New York.”

That show closed on July 1, but you’ll want to see Vered Engelhard’s piece for the Brooklyn Rail on this “celebration of Trio A’s legacy.” On Saturday, the FSLC will present a version produced in 1978 by Sally Banes paired with “with an inspired and idiosyncratic study by Charles Atlas.”

“Marking the beginning of her gradual transition from live dance to filmmaking, Yvonne Rainer directed the feature-length Lives of Performers in 1972 after a psychologically debilitating 1971,” writes Michael Eby at Screen Slate. “Various ‘intestinal demons’ struck Rainer throughout the second half of the 1960s, resulting in lengthy episodes of heavy medication and hospital stays. . . . Lives of Performers is also a portrait of a bygone era of young artists’ symbiotic SoHo loft-living; the opening scene sets us in one such loft where seven dancers rehearse the steps of Rainer’s Walk, She Said. . . . Douglas Crimp will introduce Lives, and Andy Warhol’s 1965 Paul Swan will follow, another work that exposes the fragility of the wall separating performance and nonperformance.”

Rainer’s 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.”

VIDEO

In its February 2017 issue, e-flux Journal ran the transcript of Adam Pendleton’s Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer and, in March, e-flux posted a conversation between Pendleton and Rainer moderated by the project’s curator, Adrienne Edwards.

The image at the top of this entry is from Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), screening on Sunday. The film Rainer, host Robert Gardner, and guest Deac Rossell discuss in the clip from Screening Room (March 1977) is Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), also slated for Sunday.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2vBmbAS