Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer @ FSLC

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When she completed her first feature in 1972, Yvonne Rainer, a founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater, was already established as a key choreographer of her generation; her contributions to filmmaking, surveyed in this comprehensive retrospective, would prove just as radical. Rainer’s cinema signaled new possibilities for film language, retooling narrative generally and melodrama specifically with a disjunctive audiovisual syntax, restless political intelligence, deft appropriation, and deadpan wit. Here questions of form raise, rather than diminish, the emotional stakes. “I remember that movie,” reads an intertitle from Lives of Performers, echoed across Rainer’s filmography: “It’s about all these small betrayals, isn’t it?” Complementing the lineup, as context and counterpoint, are works that feature Rainer as subject or actor, as well as those that influenced her and selections from her fellow travelers in the burgeoning feminist film movement of the 1970s.

Yvonne Rainer was a key choreographer of her generation; her contributions to filmmaking, which signaled new possibilities for film language, proved just as radical. This comprehensive retrospective also features works that feature Rainer as subject or actor, as well as those that influenced her and selections from her fellow travelers in the burgeoning feminist film movement of the 1970s.

Special thanks to the British Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and Zeitgeist Films.

Organized by Thomas Beard.

Special thanks to the British Film Institute and The Museum of Modern Art.