ABSTRACT
In her filmmaking and her choreography, Yvonne Rainer (1934–) challenges conventions around what it means to be a performer, a creator, a writer, and a spectator, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, auteur and amateur aesthetics, and the sublime and the mundane. In her life and work, she refused a traditional path while building upon the very same traditions she eschewed in complex and perceptive ways. A childhood punctuated by frequent and influential encounters with classic and avant-garde cinema segued into a young adulthood in which she was an integral player in the flourishing and radical New York art and dance scene of the 1960s. Her feature films—Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who … (1974), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and Murder (1996)—offer sometimes-political, experimental, provocative, and semi-autobiographical encounters with the vagaries of life, desire, gender, bodies, and cinema.
