Watching
Yvonne Rainer’s filmmaking career began in a hospital bed. A trailblazing dancer and choreographer in the New York art scene since 1956, Rainer had plenty of friends in the world of film but may have never dabbled in the medium herself were it not for gastrointestinal problems that got in the way of her primary vocation. In 1966, during her first of what would be many hospitalizations, her colleague Bill Davis brought an 8mm camera up to her room at St. Vincent’s hospital. She put her hand up against a blank wall and he filmed it, as she moved arm, wrist, and fingers. Just like her full-body, onstage choreography, her hand’s dance eschewed both narrative and representation; it was an experiment in what a body could do.
Hand Film was the first of Rainer’s movies to screen this year at the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art, as part of an off-and-on retrospective of her 30-year moviemaking career. Rainer herself was present for the kickoff screening, which paired the 6-minute Hand Film with her debut feature, Lives of Performers (1972). The short was presented without context; only if you knew the setting and Rainer’s reputation as a dancer in advance might this silent curio qualify as moving.
Lives of Performers is an obvious first feature. Working with a cast comprising mainly her friends from the dance world, Rainer films dancers at work and play. There’s no clear narrative, and the audio is completely unsynced from the images (except for one key moment). Rainer narrates much of the film with deadpan erudition, taking turns with the cast, who prattle on about love lives real or fictional (it’s not clear which). The photography is remarkably strong: it was shot by Chantal Akerman’s frequent cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who would collaborate with Rainer for a few more years before the two parted ways, their friendship seemingly ruptured, in the mid-70s. When the Smithsonian screening of Lives finished, Rainer assumed her place onstage for a Q&A and wryly opened, “Boy, they don’t make them like they used to.”
Interested cinephiles wandering into the Rainer catalog will discover just how well that otherwise trite quip applies. Right from the start, Rainer was always more interested in preserving her artistic integrity than in finding a broad audience. Lives ends with a Rolling Stones needle drop, which Rainer explained was used without proper licensing—thereby barring the film from commercial theatrical exhibition. Today Rainer’s work is the most readily available it’s ever been, thanks both to the Smithsonian berth and to a concurrent program at New York’s Metrograph theater, which put 4K restorations of her complete works in its streaming library. (The feature films can also be found on Kanopy; most of the shorts, on YouTube.)
At the recommendation of the NGA’s head of film programming, I grabbed a copy of Rainer’s 2006 biography Feelings Are Facts in the hopes that it would serve as a guide to understanding her films as I worked my way through them. Rainer doesn’t pick up a camera on her own until some 400 pages in, and the details of the production and intention behind her films are mostly relegated to a short epilogue. Still, the book is enormously insightful into Rainer’s character. She opens with an anecdote about her sexuality, a perennial topic of fascination throughout the book and likewise her films. As she moves through her West Coast upbringing, where she and her humorously-named brother Ivan were raised by an Italian anarchist father and a Jewish mother, toward her eventual relocation to New York, Rainer occasionally steps back from the forward march of history to analyze the privileges that gave her a leg up in life. For example, after reprinting a 1953 letter to Ivan wherein she describes her resistance to joining an interracial union at a terrible factory job she briefly held in Chicago, Rainer reprimands not only her younger self but also her present self: “I had parents who could get me out of there at any time. I don’t remember any of my coworkers’ names.” This self-criticism would become a feature of her later films, especially 1990’s bluntly named Privilege.
The biography does eventually shed some light on the development of her filmmaking philosophy. “For me, Pauline Kael’s famous declaration, ‘Only in the movies can you send your mind away,” was like a red cape thrown out to the bull,” she writes. “My tactics would do the opposite: restore and invigorate the spectator’s critical faculties!” Rainer later acknowledges a certain naivety in this mindset when it came to the actual craft of filmmaking. “Although my transition from dance to film was relatively swift,” she writes, “it took me over twenty-five years to move from ‘performer’ to ‘persona’ and make halting—and ambivalent—use of the conventions of mainstream narrative film—character, plot, exposition, verisimilitude, shot/reverse shot, and most problematic: credible, or professional, acting.”
I find Rainer’s later films—The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and Murder (1996)—to be altogether more enjoyable, more rewarding, and less punishingly obscure than her earlier work, which besides Lives of Performers includes Film About a Woman Who… (1974), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), and Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980). Throughout those first four films, the viewer is confronted with nonstop ideas in search of formal coherence to gracefully convey them. Still, each of the early works has their strong moments. Journeys from Berlin randomly, but not unpleasurably, juxtaposes scenes of a woman’s histrionic therapy sessions with title crawls recounting the history of the Baader–Meinhof Group; Film About a Woman Who… features a showstopping “Emotional Accretion in 48 Steps” that pairs a woman’s mounting rage at her husband with Bellini’s La Somnambula, all staged on a mattress on a theater stage and edited with increasingly breakneck virtuosity.
Rainer’s gradual refinement of her filmmaking technique came at little expense to her experimental and intellectual impulses—if anything, it only made them more compelling. The Man Who Envied Women has an easier narrative to follow than its predecessors: a woman and her husband, a professor of psychoanalysis, are splitting up. The husband (played by two different men who swap in and out seemingly at random) conducts interviews in a black box theater in front of a projector screen cycling through clips of old Hollywood royalty—Bette Davis, Rita Heyworth, Barbara Stanwyck—acting in stereotypically feminine ways. The wife’s face is never shown, but she narrates the whole film, comfortably outside the range of the male gaze. The other primary components of the movie include scenes where artists and immigrants testify at a New York City housing hearing (evidently unscripted) and sequences where men give interminable lectures (to women) about psychoanalysis (the women clap back). It’s brainy, heavy material, leavened by frequent bursts of comedic levity, including interstitial scenes where couples on the street fling one liners at each other (“How can you be angry at me?” one man says to a woman, “I'm simply a product of social forces beyond my control!”). At one point before a discussion of sexuality, Rainer herself even walks onscreen and, breaking the fourth wall, instructs all menstruating women in the audience to leave the theater. Even with so many disparate parts, the film’s sheer unpredictability holds you rapt.
Privilege opens with the title “A Film by Yvonne Rainer and Many Others.” Rainer appears onscreen to deliver a salvo on equality, nuclear war, and poverty; partway through, her image is minimized into a window in the corner of the screen while a Black woman takes center stage to provide an ASL interpretation, and occasionally go off-script. From there out, the film follows three women—Jenny and Brenda, both white, and the cheekily named Yvonne Washington, Black—as they discourse with their neighbors and friends about menopause and sexual violence. Throughout, Rainer puts her white characters into conversation with Black and Latina interlocutors who point out how white privilege keeps them from seeing how their race and class positions complicate their understandings of the oppression of women. “I’d like to forget about racism just as much as you,” Yvonne W. tells Jenny at the end of an unflinching fight over the subject. “The problem is, you can—I can’t.” Rainer follows this scene up with a several-minutes-long insert shot of a computer screen as it scrolls through typed-up stories, drawn from her own life, illustrating the evolution of her racial imagination from childhood through adulthood. Especially in gestures like this one, you sense Rainer’s awareness of the limits of her art-making to redress the historical ills that agitate her. The movie doesn’t presage the modern corporate DEI workshop so much as it thumbs its nose at it.
Two late changes in her life informed Rainer’s final feature: the beginning, in 1990, of a lesbian relationship (her first) with Martha Gever, a friend since the 1980s; and the onset of breast cancer requiring a mastectomy. MURDER and murder stars professional actresses Joanna Merlin and Kathleen Chalfant as middle-aged lovers who reenact scenes drawn from Rainer’s diaries and correspondences with Gever. A tuxedoed Rainer occasionally appears and interrupts the flow of events to tell the audience about her experiences with breast cancer and the medical establishment. Whenever she walks back offscreen, a ticker tape bearing ominous cancer statistics crawls across otherwise happy scenes of domestic life. Despite its grave didacticism, MURDER is also Rainer’s most whimsical film, relishing the foibles of middle-aged lesbian love and opening with a fakeout scare, set to the Jaws theme, of something sinister approaching two women playing frisbee on the beach. (A reverse shot reveals it to be Rainer with a film crew, the implications of which are hilarious to consider.)
Since 1996, Rainer has returned her attention to the dance world; her visit to the NGA this year coincided with the presentation of her final dance, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” at the Hirshhorn museum. Reflecting on her filmmaking career in a 1990 letter, Rainer attempted a summation of her ethos:
To represent social reality in all its uneven development and fit in the departments of activism, articulation, and behavior to create cinematic arrangements that can accommodate both ambiguity and contradiction without eliminating the possibility of taking specific political stands.
That’s pretty unsatisfying, isn’t it? Apparently not content with that dry explanation herself, Rainer kept fishing for something better and later on in the same letter arrives at something a bit more invigorating:
I’ve been thinking that my films, to some degree or another, can be seen as an interrogation and critique of ‘straightness,’ in both its broadest and most socially confining sense: Straightness as a bulwark, as protection, as punitive codes against deviations from social norms […] straightness that clouds the liberal imagination, congratulating itself on its tolerance; straightness that kills, cripples, and curtails the lives of gays, Lesbians, blacks, women, the poor, and the aging; straightness that equates strength with bloodshed. To be continued…
That goes down a bit easier but does it really do justice to the movies in question? What’s missing from both these self-assessments is any acknowledgment of the outsize role of playfulness in Rainer’s work. As the entirety of her filmography bears witness, even a radical call to arms against the established order of things can benefit from a little humor.