Program notes for screening of Yvonne Rainer's Kristina Talking Pictures
(4/19/1977)
MUSEUM OF ART CARNEGIE INSTITUTE
INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER YVONNE RAINER Tuesday, April 19, 1977
8:00 PM
KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976). Written, directed and edited by Yvonne Rainer.
Camera: Roper Dean, Babette Manpolte. Assistant Camera: Byron Lovelace
Martie Kavaliausltas. Sound Recording: Lawrence Loewinger. With: Bert Barr,
Kate Parker, Frances Barth, Lil Picard, James Barth, Ivan Rainer, Edward Cic-ciarelli, Yvonne Painer. 99 minutes. U.S.A.
,:I was born in San Francisco in 1934. In 1956 I came to New York to study acting. Serious involvement in dance and choreography ensued when I started studying with Martha Graham and subsequently with Merce Cunningham. Also studied ballet with Mia Slavcnska, James Waring, Peter Saul, and others, and composition with Robert Dunn and Ann Halprin. Began choreographing my own work in 1961. In 1962 Steve Paxton and I formed the workshop that spawned the Judson Dance Theater, a generative force behind the modern and "post-modern" dance activity in America in the 60's.
In 1970 I helped form the Grand Union, a co-operative New York-based performing groun.
"My choreographic works have been seen throughout the United States and in many European cities. They ihave made use of large numbers of people — both skilled and inexperienced in dance techniques —? and incorporated speech, objects, film, slides, and elaborate choreography to music. By 1972 my growing interest in film resulted in a 15mm feature-length narrative film entitled LIVES OF THE PERFORMERS, which I wrote and directed. In recent work I have continued to explore the relationship of language and image. Film and slides play an increasingly important role in my performances as a necessary visual and fictional dimension." Yvonne Rainer
KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES is a narrative film inasmuch as it contains a series of events that can be synthesised into a story if one is disposed to do so. (A European woman lion-tamer cones to America and takes up choreography.) The film can also be characterised by its discursions from a strict narrative line via reflections on art, love and catastrophe sustained by the voices of Kristina, the heroine-narrator, and Raoul, her lover.
Within its form of shifting correlations between word and image, persona and performer, enactment and illustration, explanation and ambiguity, KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES circles in a narrowing spiral towards its primary concerns: the uncertain relation of public act to personal fate, the ever-present possibility for disparity between public-directed conscience and private will.
Having just put your cheque to Amnesty International in the mailbox, you are mugged ... or discover you have cancer ... or perhaos you betray an old friend. Nothing can ensure that we remain honorable, nor save us from betrayal and death.
Ruby Rich, Curatorial Assistant at the Film Center, Art Institute of Chicago, has written of Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974):
Best known for her extensive work in performance, work that has spanned over a decade of concern and moved from the influence of Graham through the teachings of Cunningham to the invention of a unique minimalist lexicon, over the past few years Rainer has focused increasingly on the films that had always constituted one element of her work. Consequently, FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... presents the happy difficulty of drawing upon a rich multiplicity of traditions not often available to the filmmaker or film audience. A viewer grounded in Russian Futurism, Meyerhold, Duchamn. John Cage, modern performance, and recent photographic modes, finds material in the film that speaks to that awareness. A viewer schooled wholely on film
- Edinburgh International Film Festival Catalogue, 1976
over
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itself finds a virtual compendium of conventions, with ample reference to PSYCHO,
RED DESERT, the language of melodrama, the posing of soap opera. By the same token, a viewer up on the facets of Rainer's own life, past work and New York setting finds constant evidence of the autobiography that generates the fictions. In her extraordinary synthesis and reinterpretation of form, Rainer succeeds in fashioning a film which, consumed in 105 minutes, rises again phoenix-like to demand attention and contemplation for a long time to come. In retrospect, FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... is likely to assume a position as one of the truly seminal films of our decade.
Rainer's film represents a critical juncture in the battle long waged between Hollywood's narrative tradition and the avant-garde American cinema's very different history of formal experimentation. The animosity has been mutual, with few exceptions. Just as Hollywood has maintained an antagonism to formal concerns and narrative innovation (based on box-office standards as well as a Horatio-Alger-inspired anti-intellectualism), the formally sophisticated avant-garde has fostered an equal level of hostility to the intrusion of personal, emotional, or overtly narrative content. While this separatism is understandable in terms of the relationship, both aesthetic and economic, between the two camps, it results in a dichotomy as archaic as philosophical mind/body cant.
FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... commits this dilemma of narrative structure to the forefront of its concerns. Certain European filmmakers working in feature film have similarly concentrated on narrative problems — notably Godard, whose influence Rainer cites, as well as early Fassbinder, Straub/Huillet, Rivette — but few Americans have indicated an equally serious coning-to-terms. (...)
Parallel to this animosity between Hollywood and the avant-garde has been the continuing cold war between the politically radical and the artistically radical.
The unfortunate combination of a politically radical statement, whether Marxist or feminist, within a formally reactionary aesthetic poses an increasingly urgent problem. The set of battle lines has divided along the issue of humanism versus formalism. In our decade, feminists have often identified artistic formalism as cold, anti-humanist, and masculine; Marxists have just as often perceived formalism as Pretentious, elitist, and ruling-class-identified. Proponents of formalism, in turn, tend to cite philistinism, anti-intellectualism and aesthetic naivete in answer to these political challenges. (Of late there has been a new recognition that message and presentation are indissoluble, that a radical concept is undermined by a conservative framework and vice versa, in other words, the very lesson of the Russian revolutionary filmmakers.) The lack of resolution is a painful one. While Rainer does not label herself a feminist, it is no coincidence that it is a woman who has placed a Priority on uniting these two long disparate elements. For the major contribution of the women's movement to the arts has been its insistence on the inclusion of emotion as a prime value. To women, whose emotions and instincts have so long been denied as fraudulent, the revival of emotion as a proper and indeed necessary subject of artistic concern has always been a major feminist platform. As feminist critics have begun to reevaluate film history, two basic methods have emerged, the American/sociological approach and the Europenn/theoretical preference. Ironically, both methods validate Rainer’s position in FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO ..., yet the. film has been the object of much feminist attack. (...)
Though accurate only on a simplistic level, it is nevertheless tempting to see Rainer as working to create a melodrama for our time, peculiarly suited to satisfying the fragmented and demanding hungers of the modern urban psyche. Sensitively retaining the enduringly valid emphases of the genre, Rainer subordinated them to new formal concerns. In a conversation with Lucy Lippard, Rainer predicted that there was no way back to emotional involvement in art without some kind of removal element to set it off: "It's like wishing for a lost innocence." Our overwrought society, unable to find remedies at a simple level, demends that its art make as many connections as possible between personal and cultural experience and insight. Yvonne Rainer, with her uncompromising formal explorations and acute autoanalysis, offers one alternative to the damaging quagmire of hostile posturing afflicting current cinematic theory." — Ruby Rich, Film Center program notes, Feb., 1976
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Annette Michelson has written in Artforun on LIVES OF THE PERFORMERS (1972) :
There are, in the contemporary renewal of performance modes, two basic and diverging impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first, grounded in the idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mythopoeic in its aspiration, eclectic in its forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic style which constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism. Its celebrants are: for theater, Artaud, Grotowski, for film Murnau and Brakhage, and
for the dance, Wigman, Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment to objectification, proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are analytic and its spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film, Eisenstein and Snow, for dance, Cunningham and Rainer. (...)
The film (LIVES OF THE PERFORMERS) is composed of parts, sequences or pieces which give it the total, compositional aspect of a "recital." And it cannot with any justice be described as an integral whole; its parts, while not wholly disjunct from one another, function as variations upon a number of given themes and strategies. Rainer’s first use of disjunction is for the creation of a semblance of fictional continuity out of situations which are, nevertheless, experienced as largely discrete with respect to the notion of an enveloping fictional whole. The film then begins to project a series of variations upon its themes and strategies. The text, partly projected in titles, partly read off-screen, chronicles the complex interrelationships developing among performers during a period of rehearsal. One must remember that fragments of this scenario had been performed "live' together with commentary at the Whitney Museum, and that evidence of or reference to these presentations is present in the film — largely through the recorded laughter of a knowing and appreciative audience, recorded at performance time. The result is a very complex temporality. One has the retelling, by off-screen voices of past events, fictive in nature involving fictive versions, as it were, of the real performers who in recalling, under their own names, the events of that fictive past, make reference, from time to time, to real performances (that of Grand Union Dreams, or of Inner Appearances). The temporal complexity of this sort of superimposition will on occasion be intensified by the sharing or shifting of roles. A dialogue begins between Yvonne and two performers, Fernando and Shirley, later joined by Valda and John. Yvonne, the director, provides certain information, while Fernando and his fellow-performers discuss the nuances in shifts of feeling and of commitment which animate their complex interrelationship, These, while constantly being explicated, in that idiom of somewhat manic autoanalysis which characterizes life and love in a therapeutically oriented culture, are not always clear. John’s role is particularly shadow,ry, and Yvonne announces at one point that she is going to assume his role. Although literary texts and cultural heroes are from time to time quoted and evoked, there is really one single mode of intellectual discourse which informs the 'action" of this film and its "characters"; that of psychoanalysis, in its latter-day, revisionist modes. Much of the material presented, then, in LIVES ds the stuff of bourgeois drama — and ccnedy — the succession of tiny crises and realignments, the snail agonies and apperceptions of a milieu existing wholly within the area of performance and rehearsal, its cross-analysis of motives and intentions expanding to fill its entire psychic space.
— Annette Michelson Art forum,. Jan./Feb..
' 1974
