Still from Film About a Woman Who...
(1974), dir. Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer began her career as a dancer and choreographer in the late 1950s. She co-founded the legendary Judson Dance Theater in New York in the early 1960s in an attempt to do away with the conventions around dance. Rainer's most influential work from this period is The Mind Is a Muscle (1966-68), a piece that illustrates the artist's conceptual approach in linking materiality to her concern for the 'seduction of the spectator by the will of the performer'. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, 'the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.'
With Babette Mangolte as cinematographer, Film About a Woman Who... (1974, 105 mins, B&W, 16mm, transferred to DVD), focuses on the relationships between two women and two men and features disjointed scenes of the couples' interactions. Rainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.
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