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Yvonne Rainer
by Erin Brannigan |
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Erin Brannigan is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales. Her area of research is dance and film, in particular, the points of contact between dance and film theory. She is also the curator of ReelDance: International Dance on Screen Festival and Body on Screen (Melbourne Festival 2003), and is on the RealTime editorial team. filmography bibliography articles in Senses web resources |
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—Yvonne Rainer (1)
Dancer, choreographer, performer, filmmaker and writer Yvonne Rainer, who began choreographing in 1961 and made her first film in 1967, is a key figure in the story of the New York avant-garde in terms of both her writing and practice. (2) Rainer provided a commentary on the influences that preceded her own aesthetic objectives and articulated her own project through practice and explicatory discourse, establishing her position as a key player within the New York avant-garde from the early 1960s through to the mid-1990s. During this period she produced twelve films, including silent short works for multimedia performances (which she calls “filmed choreographic exercises”) (3) as well as features. According to Rainer, her fascination with dance and film emerged simultaneously when she moved on from acting at 25 (p. 51). She is certainly a choreographer who had as many film reference points as choreographic, evidenced in the use of projection in her stage work and her erudite use of cinematic quotation in her film work. (4) What links Rainer's dance and film work is an intense critique of disciplinary conventions and a profound interrogation of the role of performance. Performance is central to all aspects of Rainer's work; she herself refers to performance as the subject matter in her films (p. 8) and Peggy Phelan describes her writings as “rhetorical performances”. (5) Rainer's parents were migrants, her mother Polish-Jewish (“a potential stage mother”) and her father Italian (“an anarchist and a house painter”), who settled in San Francisco. Rainer describes herself as a shy child who liked to read and her childhood as “depressed”. (6) At around 15 she started attending socialist-anarchist meetings with her brother where she made friends with some visiting New Yorkers. At 20 Rainer “fell into” acting school at the Theater Arts Colony in San Francisco, but after some frustrations there she moved to New York with a painter, Al Held. There she became involved in the visual arts scene and continued acting classes, now at the Herbert Berghof school where she was told she was “too intellectual” (pp. 49–50). Rainer started full-time training at the Martha Graham School at 25 and danced full-time with the support of her parents, spending her spare time at the Museum of Modern Art watching film classics. She moved on to Merce Cunningham's classes and then became part of an informal collective meeting in the Cunningham studios who would work together and perform for each other. Rainer became a central figure in the American postmodern dance movement, specifically the New York activity surrounding the venue, Judson Church. Following Merce Cunningham's lead, Judson Dance Theatre was inclusive of artists working in other disciplines. Filmmaking was particularly predominant at Judson Dance Theatre events and Sally Banes describes this area as a “key outgrowth” of the group. (7) A film work, by regular contributor Elaine Summers and others, opened the very first Judson performance and within the series there were other screenings including Brian De Palma's 1963 film, Wotan's Wake (which parodies Maya Deren among other things). (8) Peter Wollen and Vicky Allan have written that experimental filmmakers have always been “interested in analogies between dance and film as kinetic and time-based art forms”, (9) and in the case of the '60s and '70s, choreographic and film/video strategies can be discussed as concomitant with the two disciplines informing and elaborating on each other. Along with De Palma, other filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Shirley Clarke, Amy Greenfield, Doris Chase and Hilary Harris worked with dance and dancers. (10) Rainer ultimately states, however, that her influences were from outside the experimental film scene; that she was familiar with the work of Maya Deren and filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, but “the ideas didn't really turn me on the way that [John] Cage's ideas in music and '60s art practices had.” (11)
Rainer's films have mainly been analysed from within a feminist or avant-garde framework, (13) and her career has been viewed as a linear progression with 'problems' that emerged in her dancing being worked through in her films. In her introductory essay to Rainer's collected writings, Peggy Phelan demonstrates Rainer's truly vanguard status and the part played by her transition from dance to film. She points to the fact that Rainer's ideological project interrogating the inscription of spectatorial positions within the film text and the corresponding functions of narrative, pre-dates the feminist film theories that have been used to 'read' her films and can be found at work in her choreography (pp. 9–10). Jonathan Walley (14) continues this argument, adding that Rainer's desire to deal with character and social relations was not part of a larger shift toward narrative in the cinematic avant-garde as argued by Noel Carroll. (15) Rainer's turn to “emotional life”, (p. 92) which ultimately lead her away from dance and toward her interest in film, was in fact a reaction against the minimalist and Cagean traditions that had informed her choreography. (16) Both these points can be verified with passages from Rainer's own writing, particularly in her 1984 interview with Lyn Blumenthal and a paper given by Rainer in 1997. (17) Rainer's position as an innovator within film practice, pre-empting major shifts in both feminist discourse and avant-garde film movements, can be traced to her shift across disciplines bringing ideas and strategies from postmodern dance, visual arts and musical composition to the avant-garde film scene in New York. One of the most discussed aspects of Rainer's shift from dance to film has circled around her reconfiguration of the performer/spectator relation. This project began with Rainer's battle against a narcissistic/voyeuristic model of dance performance, a critique that had ideological repercussions for the dance audience. Rainer's choreography was freed from the exclusivity of virtuosic dance; an 'everybody' was performing and this thrilled as many people as it shocked. A new relation between performer and spectator was achieved through a suppression of spectacle in the dancer's activity on stage, a kinetic familiarity with the corporeal performance, challenging phrasing that evened out dramatic crescendos and an aversion of the dancer's gaze. Spectatorial 'reconditioning' was achieved through the very construction and execution of the dances and was built into the performance, inserting into her work an inherent socio-political challenge. In discussions of spectatorial models for her film work, Rainer's dance performances are seen as failed attempts at presenting the body as an 'object' and reworking the performer/spectator relation, with subjectivity seen as an inevitable element of live physical performance. (18) Walley sees this 'problem' as one of the “contradictions and limitations” that lead Rainer toward more narrative performance and then film. (19) But the continuities between Rainer's performance strategies on stage and on screen are enlightening given the radical break she was making with contemporaneous trends in avant-garde film. (20) If Rainer's films explore “the ways in which art was undemocratic, ideological, fraught with problems related to power and authority, and decidedly mediated”, (21) she had already undertaken an exploration of such issues within her choreographic work. The sense of continuity within and across Rainer's two bodies of work comes from the continual questioning of meaning construction and presentation through performance, whether on the level of the actions of performers or the total performance comprising of the constituent elements of the work. Rainer deconstructs the smooth surface of cinematic construction and critiques the politics of its spectator/performer relations by interrogating the basic components of the apparatus, just as she had deconstructed the performance conventions of contemporary dance by adjusting the tone and phrasing of the choreography at the level of the basic unit. The various combinations and contradictions of figural movement, image, spoken or printed text, sound and spatial perspective, and the relation of this on-screen material to audience expectation, is an area for constant interrogation in Rainer's films. (22) An interest in the relation between content and notions of 'performance', what Phelan terms “Rainer's literal exploration of the disconnections between form and content”, (p. 13) can be read in relation to narrative in Rainer's films. Rainer often discusses what could be called a play with the 'transmission' of the performative in her screen work within the context of her interrogation of the cinematic elements of narrative and character. In 1978, Rainer spoke at The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film, discussing the demands of narrative filmmaking and describing a type of film that contains “both narrative and non-narrative characteristics”: Rainer's rewiring of the conventions of cinematic production and generic expectation challenge the kind of cinema of illusion and exclusion based on an ordering notion of production, what Rainer calls the “tyranny” of the “predominating form of narrative” (p. 138). What Rainer is describing in the quote above, these images that repeat, prolong, create rhythm, freeze, result in an alternative cinema that never completely gives over its connections with narrative conventions. These 'choreographic' elements that play with movement across space and time demonstrate Rainer's interest in cinematic motion beyond movements of production, (23) but are only 'activated' when they bump up against the narrativity that becomes more and more important across Rainer's oeuvre. She often cites Jean-Luc Godard in her writing and his influence is certainly felt in these strategies that work the space between the narrative and non-narrative in a detailed and sophisticated way. (24) In Lives of Performers (1972), Rainer's first full-length film and the one that most clearly demonstrates her shift from dance to film, the distance from narrative cinematic conventions and critique of traditional spectatorial positions is pronounced. Often considered as a kind of early 'sketch' within Rainer's oeuvre that hasn't quite made the shift from stage to screen, this film lays bare Rainer's founding strategies that will go on to support her increasingly political content. In Lives of Performers there is no higher order or purpose structuring the action on screen and the elements and sections of the film are strung together like her uninflected dance phrases; no single part is given more value, the score is not subservient to the visuals, there is no central character with whom we identify. Rainer says the two ideas that frame Lives of Performers are “dance and emotional life”, (p. 177) and the film does revolve around both the on and off-stage, fictional and non-fictional activities of a group of dancer/performers. Footage of dance rehearsals, dramatic enactments, photo stills and tableaux vivants are set against a sound score that comments on and runs across the action. As Rainer puts it, “although a very loaded set of circumstances begins to emerge” in Lives of Performers, “you cannot follow the story” (pp. 74–5). These circumstances are created through an exposition of the characters' private and emotional lives via the spoken text and certain enacted scenes and images. But any sense of a fictional narrative is thwarted; the performers' real names are used and are consequently mixed around, and the degree of realism in the naming of the cast bleeds into the romantic involvements and character attributes which could be mistaken as real (p. 69). Spontaneous, intimate and realistic elements are set against the contrived and theatrical to subvert any persistent sense of the fictional; the layering of performances is confounding. Despite this play on notions of 'character', Rainer doesn't baulk from the use of melodrama or comedy on screen whenever she sees fit, as Phelan points out. (25) But the melodramatic aspects of the film—talk of love, desire and sexual contact, scenes of emotional intimacy, love triangles—are countered by the filmic treatment which thwarts genre expectations. This subversion is particularly pointed in the distance that the commentary on the actions creates. The inclusion of rehearsals or 'works-in-progress' within the body of the filmic performance further complicates the spectator's position. Given the title of the film we could expect to see the characters going about the business of creating work, and there is actual footage from the rehearsal of one of Rainer's pieces, Walk, She Said. But the film as a performance is itself interrupted by slippages between the rehearsal and the rehearsed. There is spontaneous laughing in the voiceover at the beginning of the film during what could be loosely termed an exposition, suggesting that we are hearing a script reading rather than the final take. This is complicated by apparent spontaneity written into the text; we hear lines such as “Yvonne, were you reading that?” and “I was reading a part that John would have read”, along with the sound of turning pages. The voiceover purposely confuses improvised and scripted speech with no matching visual reference points for clarification. Footage of a dance rehearsal is marked by repetition and monotony, has a messy quality that makes our viewing feel premature, and the staged 'scenes' in the domestic set are awkward, unremarkable and lack the direction of purpose expected of a well-rehearsed dramatic scene. The following quotation reiterates Rainer's comments above regarding the use of excessive cinematic movements in shifting the progression of the film from the horizontal to something more 'vertical': Often, the orders of cinematic movement in Lives of Performers not only interrupt, but overwhelm, any possibility of a horizontal drive in the film. For instance, the prolonged shot of Valda in her newly arrived sun visor exceeds any signifying function. There is also a substantial amount of stillness in the film, either through the freezing of action or shots of/pans over photographs. The director spends precious film stock on still photographs including images from a dance performance that the cast were involved in just prior to the film being made, and her reconstructions of pictorial compositions for the camera is strange and disturbing. Lives of Performers ends with a series of tableaux vivants, “re-enacting the series of published production stills from a scenario of Pandora's Box” (p. 72). Movement and stillness exist for their own choreographic qualities, independent of narrative demands. One influence on Rainer in these early films that has not received much attention is the role of cinematographer Babette Mangolte, recently arrived to New York and prior to working with Chantal Akerman. (26) Mangolte provides a link between Rainer and the innovative Paris-based film director whose attention to screen performance and anti-narrative film movement makes her work of relevance. Both dance as a type of performance along with a choreographic approach to other types of figural and filmic movement feature in Lives of Performers, and Rainer's choreographic background is perhaps most evident in this, her first feature film. She describes the script for this film as being like choreographic directions, outlining “groupings and regroupings” (pp. 74–5) and points to her interest in the effects of movement and stillness as a result of her “dance days” (pp. 158–9). But Rainer has already made the shift toward a more cinematic type of physical performance. On this adjustment Rainer writes: While dancers do dance in Lives of Performers, an equality is established between the movements of drama and movements identified as 'dance'. Various entries by a “protagonist” (Valda Setterfield) into a room during a stage performance are cut together and draw our attention to the physical performance through repetition and variation. The same woman performs a 'solo' in a spotlight, creating shapes with her arms, and this stylised movement has the same performative tone and inexplicable function as the previous example. The role of choreography would change throughout Rainer's film career. In relation to Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), Rainer says:
Rainer's growing emphasis on language in her films is coupled with an increasing fascination with theory which is exposed in her films from Film About a Woman Who… (1974), which Rainer refers to as “pre-political”, (p. 262) on. In Film About a Woman Who…, Kristina Talking Pictures and Journey from Berlin/1971, the strategies complicating performer and character, fact and fiction, rehearsal and rehearsed, sound and image and the manipulation of cinematic movement orders outlined above in relation to Lives of Performers, are still operating and are intensified, developing Rainer's critique of narrative film techniques and related spectatorial profiles. In 1982, Rainer describes the “spectator-of-my-dreams”, who “has given equal attention to the fictions and the production of these fictions” (pp. 211–12). There is also, across these films, a growing preoccupation with feminist and psychoanalytic theory which leaks into the script and images, providing yet another performative layer for the director to play with. In this sense Rainer shifts from pre-empting theory to developing alongside and in direct response to it, in a very 'public' fashion. (28) When we get to The Man Who Envied Women (1985) Rainer's attitude regarding theory has crystallised, matching her general attitude which is characterised by Phelan as a “profound psychological ambivalence and intellectual scepticism”. (29) The amount of theory both quoted within, and informing the structure of, this film verges on the ridiculous; a sense of play never abandons Rainer. In this film Rainer would “throw down the gauntlet to psychoanalytic feminist film theory” (p. 207) and, as she herself acknowledges, such a task requires her to take on the elements of narrative cinema to an unprecedented degree. Rainer renders the female subject in The Man Who Envied Women invisible, existing only as a voice-over performed by, coincidentally, the intensely ephemeral choreographer/dancer Trisha Brown. By aligning audience identification with an absent female protagonist and having the male lead played by two actors, Rainer short-circuits the male-dominated power structures that the feminist film theorists had found to be 'built into' cinematic language. Rainer turns the male gaze/female object formula on its head by removing the female spectacle and fracturing the central, stable male identity. In an interview at the time The Man Who Envied Women was in development, Rainer describes her complex relation to theory, noting its capacity to seduce and remarking that “sometimes reading Stephen Heath is a turn on” (p. 83). Rainer's critique of theory as both another field for playing out power relations and a performance to be interrogated somehow coexists in her films with a mobilisation of key theoretical concepts for her own purposes. In the same interview Rainer admits to discomfort with the language of theory which is evidenced in the film; the scene in which the central male character, Jack Dellar, delivers a philosophy lecture to his students is so prolonged, the lecture so impossible to follow and the camera so distracted (wandering throughout the space), a critique of the 'performance' of theory is achieved. Rainer both presents and subverts in the same aesthetic gesture. (30) Rainer's subversive strategies regarding film form have provided the groundwork for not only her philosophical and feminist subject matter, but an ever-broadening field of socio-political concerns both large and small; from the politics of New York real estate to the clinical demonising of menopause. As Adrian Martin writes, Rainer has always been “a tough, critical, ever sceptical political artist”, (31) but she is also one who never commits the cardinal sin of losing her sense of humour. Rainer's commentary is always characterised by scepticism and irony rather than cynicism or pessimism; she wants to provoke, not alienate.
In Privilege, even more than in The Man Who Envied Women, Rainer's characters have gained a formal consistency that supports the more demanding themes, but an anarchic approach to film form remains: the film is shot in a variety of formats; a single monologue is assigned to numerous actors; the script features what Rainer terms her “plagiarist practices” (p. 232) of quoting other writings and film footage; actors appear in flashbacks with no attempt to alter their age; documentary-style interviews with old friends are combined with carefully scripted, fictional interviews; and the wrap-party is included at the end of the film. One shot that Rainer singles out is a close-up of the rapist accusing the victim of provoking his actions, but his mouth does not move; the persuasive close-up is coupled with unreliable dialogue and a severing of subject and voice (p. 240). The questions Rainer is raising about racial and economic privilege, and the connections between this and sexual violence, are never answered but left hanging between voices, bodies, images. MURDER and murder (1996, winner of the Teddy Award, Berlin Film Festival, 1997 and the Special Jury Award, Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1999), was made after Rainer's characteristically public and publicly self-analysed 'coming out' as a lesbian in 1991. (33) The film also corresponds with Rainer's breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy. MURDER and murder is considered Rainer's fullest commitment to fictional characterisation, being her first film to actually play out a relationship between two characters on screen with dialogues replacing monologues. The mature lesbian couple at the centre of the film have replaced the young dancers caught up in heterosexual liaisons in Lives of Performers 24 years earlier, camera techniques are more conventional and 'stable', but cinematic time and space still provide Rainer with plenty of room to confound (p. 270). With the release of MURDER and murder, retrospectives of Rainer's work were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. Rainer's most recent work was a choreographic commission for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak dance project, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which she translated to film in 2002. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid marks a return within Rainer's film work to choreographic material. The film takes its name from an Aldous Huxley book about a decadent millionaire's pursuit of immortality set in the 1930s. The short film juxtaposes rehearsal footage from the White Oak performance and her research into turn-of-the-century Vienna. Ann Daly describes the video as “a dense, fragmented collage of moving and static images, along with two sets of aphoristic texts” (34). In the same year, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia mounted a retrospective exhibition, Yvonne Rainer: Radial Juxtapositions 1961–2002, which featured an installation version of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid. The exhibition also featured a second installation by filmmaker Charles Atlas, Rainer Variations (2002), a montage dealing with Rainer's career using real and simulated interviews and rehearsal footage. The exhibition also featured film screenings, photos, posters, manuscripts and notebooks. Rainer has also received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Wexner Prize and a MacCarthur Fellowship and currently teaches at the Independent Study Programme, Whitney Museum, New York. © Erin Brannigan, June 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography As
director/writer: 
Bibliography Articles,
books and scripts by Rainer:
Articles in Senses of Cinema From
Objecthood to Subject Matter: Yvonne Rainer's Transition from Dance to
Film
by Jonathan Walley
Web Resources Felix
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