Yvonne Rainer Retrospective: Lives of Performers (1972)

Showtime:
* Tue, 2/28, 4:00 pm

Join us every Tuesday for the next 7 weeks for a Marin County exclusive theatrical retrospective of one of Avant-Gard’s most influential and boundary-pushing woman filmmakers of our time.

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.

(Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph)

(1972)

NR / 1hr 90min