Screening Room: Yvonne Rainer

In March 1977, Yvonne Rainer appeared on Screening Room with film scholar and author Deac Rossell, to screen and discuss excerpts from her film Kristina Talking Pictures (5:04/8:51/8:54/2:10/8:33/5:36). Relentless exploration of the nature of performance, the construction of meaning, and the relations of the sexes has guided Yvonne Rainer s long career, first in avant–garde choreography and dance and then in filmmaking. Her honors include Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships along with numerous exhibitions of her work, including recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Her other films include Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who... (1974), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1991), and Murder and Murder (1996). Yvonne Rainer is a pivotal figure in the history of 20th-century American art. Credited with inventing the term “post-modern dance,” she was among its leading thinker–practitioners from the early 1960 s until 1975 when she stopped performing. Since the mid–1970s, at a crucial point in the development of feminist filmmaking, she has been one of its leading innovators, opening up feminist film to alternative possibilities, and forging a new film language at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. – Claire MacDonald, Performance Research, 2001