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Potholes and Potshots: |
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Ms. Rainer is a saturnine
independent who makes jokey, unkempt, opinionated films.
– Manny Farber & Patricia
Patterson, 1975 (1)
Her work in dance was characterised
by a hostility to artifice, an insistence upon granting the everyday movement
of the ordinary body the status of dance, a concentration on pure movement
unencumbered by metaphor, a will to make the body stand for nothing but itself. (2)
This idea of
stripping down the body to its essential materiality, getting rid of its
cultural loading of metaphor, is a formalist, somewhat purist notion of early ’60s minimalist art across all
media. It has left an enduring legacy – the emphasis on the fact of the body
(before or beyond character), the grain of the voice, the sheer intractability
of the physical – which is an important premise in works as diverse as Pina
Bausch’s choreography, the films of Chantal Akerman or Laleen Jayamanne, Lyndal Jones’ performance
pieces, and Lesley Stern’s live performance video Delayed Reaction (1989).
This formalist
credo of pure movement/gesture went hand in hand with an evacuation of
everything we know as psychological characterisation in naturalistic theatre,
film and literature – something Rainer has consistently and inventively avoided
right through her subsequent decades of film and video making. However, by the
end of the ’60s, Rainer
was pushing minimal dance and performance into deliberately impure areas – dealing
with socially loaded character (stereo)types, and with vestiges of narrative.
Even before she
got into film, Rainer was
already rebelling against the purism of minimal dance (“physical research” as she called it), working toward the culture-filled impurism that is explored
by all of the
above-mentioned artists. She “grew impatient with the limitations of the body’s
expressivity”, as she remarked in 1986. “What the body can say without verbal
language is limited”. (3) So
her performance work of the late
’60s and early ’70s began to incorporate various, floating pieces of
text – passages recited “off” or projected on slides – and, eventually, multi-media
aspects including filmed components. Using the minimalist strategies of
isolating and permutating elements, she set in motion experiments like this one
from 1970, recalled 15 years later.
Two
people at a time, from a group of ten or more, having hung large signs around
their necks, come to the foreground of the performing area to strike ordinary
sitting and standing poses with gazes directed toward or away from one another.
The signs read variously “sister”, “brother”, “mother”, “other woman”, “lover”,
“child”, “son”, “friend”, “husband”, etc. In sequential tableaux vivants “daughter” sits next to “lover” or “other woman” stands near “father”, etc.,
until all of the possible combinations of relationship and intrigue are
exhausted. This primitive exercise in attribution can hardly be construed as
having created “characters”, yet it remains for me an important point of reference,
reminding me of how little it takes to indicate identity and relationship and
point both in the direction of narrative. Introduce a prop or two and we have
melodrama. Introduce language and it’s time to clear the decks again. (4)
It was
precisely these impure complications of melodrama and language which Rainer’s
films were to pursue most richly. Rainer’s move into a disjunctive form of
narrative, which all her films adhere to, was provocative in the context of early ’70s American avant-garde film,
dominated as it was by the abstract lyricism of Stan
Brakhage or the extremely
minimalist structuralism of Hollis Frampton – both styles involving an almost
complete refusal of any complicity with narrative. (The Canadian Michael Snow
offers a different, separate case.) Rainer pioneered an exploration that was
later dubbed in the early ‘80s by October magazine as the New Talkie –
a loose movement with which we associate the films of Peter Wollen and Laura
Mulvey, Mark Rappaport, Sigmund Freud’s Dora (1979), Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979), and many related works of the period.
For her part,
Rainer pushed onto the American avant-garde agenda not only narrative and the insistent presence of written/spoken
language, but also the self-conscious appropriation of theory – elements that
can still rankle residual experimental purists.
Although she once wondered aloud whether she was “a
formalist on her way to being a realist” (5), Rainer’s art more truly partakes
of that almost primal disjunction which Gilles Deleuze, in his books on cinema,
locates at the origin of cinema’s modernism: the severing of the sensory-motor
connection, the ways in which narrative events conventionally proceed from,
seem to be generated out of, the motivated consciousnesses of characters.
Rainer puts it succinctly: “words are uttered but not possessed by my performers
as they operate within the filmic frame but do not propel a filmic plot”. (6) And once things
start happening beyond and all around bodies, we enter the dizzy realm of what
Deleuze calls op and son events, sudden flowerings and mutations
of image and sound occurrences, unlocatable in any originating point-of-view.
Rainer’s films
of the ’70s – Lives of
Performers, Film About a Woman Who... (1974), and Kristina
Talking Pictures (1976) – play extraordinary games with the
attribution and locatability of effects of narrative sense. The great textual
questions of the art and theory of the time – who speaks and is spoken? who
moves and is moved? is the ground beneath you (as spectator) solid or shifting?
– are put into intensive circulation. Rainer remarks that “character and plot
are almost an afterthought as they slide behind devices that foreground not
only the production of narrative but its frustration and cancellation as well”. (7) Brechtian or deconstructive
strategies – printed intertitles, deadpan voice-overs, different actors playing
the same character – mingle with more sinuous, sensuous shifts and
slides.
Rainer’s
cultural influences and sources are thus a diverse and mixed provenance:
minimalism, formalism, Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard,
classic Hollywood cinema, soap opera, Emma Goldman. As she proceeded through the ’70s, the twin influences
of feminism and film theory became more marked. But her work has never
corresponded to the dry caricature of the theoretical essay-film. For she weaves
together a sober, distanced deconstruction with a subversive, irreverent style
of neurotic humour – with theory itself often subjected to devastating parody
or contradiction.
She did not
simply refuse or leave behind the research lessons of minimal dance or
Frampton-style structural film – rather, she utilised them as a support for a
new kind of exploration. Nor did the scientific-rationalist leaning of ’70s materialist theory take
her away from the intricate (and often hilarious) mining of irrationalist or
mad-rationalist lapses, non-sequiturs and free associations that are so common
in her work, and which often problematise Theory itself (“Well, you know,
Shirley, I’ve always been a pushover for sweeping statements about society by
deep thinkers”).
Furthermore, the
sobriety, the slightly puritanical aspect of her work (particularly when it
comes to Hollywood cinema and its emotive/sentimental pleasures) is juxtaposed
with the discontinuous pursuit of a certain kind of attenuated
emotional-expressive effect arising from all that sensory-motor disconnection.
For all the undoubted coolness and irony of these strategies, the films also
evoke a particular kind of involvement and expressivity. In 1976, Rainer
wondered aloud:
Can
specific states of mind and emotion or subtleties of social interaction be
conveyed in film without being attached or by being only provisionally attached
to particularities of place, time, person, and relationship?... Are faces such
as belong to Katharine Hepburn and Liv Ullmann the only vehicles for grief and
passion? (8)
Film About a Woman Who ... and Kristina Talking Pictures work through the
exploration of disjunctive narrative modes. Noël Carroll enumerates the devices she employs:
“She will have the same character played by different performers in order to
block empathy while also using printed statements or deadpan voice-over
expressions of inner feelings to cool our engagement with the characters.” (9)
The narrative
is never singular – there are pieces, suggestions of many stories – with a
multiplicity of narrating or commenting voices creating ever-wider
discrepancies between what we see and hear. There is never any stable truth to
the text, no origin to the story – rather a labyrinth of inferences, cues,
clues, subjective accounts, which endlessly subvert what we as spectators think
we know, or can deduce about proceedings. The use of actors is similarly
multiple and shifting. Rainer endlessly spins out disconcerting distinctions
between the actor and the part he or she is playing – going so far in Lives of Performers as to make
the supposed confessions of the real actors simply another treacherous
fictional layer.
In Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) and The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Rainer’s concerns become
more explicitly political, and her emphasis shifts from the play with narrative
to an exploration of what we can justly call discourse. A discourse can be understood as a specific slice of social speech, a particular
ideology or set of values. The figures or voices in her films come more and
more to be the vessels for such discourses – posed not in a coherent sequence or
argument, but in an overlapping, dialectical contest.
Journeys from Berlin explores the incommensurability of discourses: what
has the personal (one’s dreams, loves, everyday habits) got to do with the
political (global issues such as terrorism)? The Man Who Envied Women engages
in a sophisticated way with feminist film theory (Rainer often publicly cites
Teresa de Lauretis and Laura Mulvey), creating a dense montage
of the multiple voices of sex and gender discourse. She described her method in
1986.
Play
off different, sometimes conflicting, authorial voices. And here I’m not
talking about balance or both sides of a question like the nightly news, or
about finding a “new language” for women. I’m talking about registers of
complicity/protest/acquiescence within a single shot or scene that do not give
a message of despair. (10)
Rainer’s
political investments and involvements underwent an evident evolution. Her move
into film coincided with an increasingly explicit use of feminism, following
the path she describes thus: “From
descriptions of individual feminine experience floating free of both social
context and narrative hierarchy, to descriptions of individual feminine
experience placed in radical juxtaposition against historical events, to
explicitly feminist speculations about feminine experience”. (11)
While an acute
sense of gender roles is already well in place in Lives of Performers,
there is a clear leap from the quasi-existential games-people-play aspect of
that film (validating momentarily the oft-made comparison between Rainer and Woody Allen), to the more cut-throat power relations
between the sexes outlined in later works, relations which are particularly
insidious and double-binding for women by the time of The Man Who Envied
Women.
Although Rainer
is sometimes offhandedly
dismissed as a ’70s artist by those same people who cast out feminist film
theory from their purview as the aberration of a long-ago Utopian era, the fact
remains that her films have occasioned some of the most important feminist
criticism of the ’80s (essays by Patricia Mellencamp, Bérénice Reynaud, Lucy
Fischer, Teresa De Lauretis).
There is also a
development, from the films of the ’70s to those of the ’80s, of an engagement with issues of Big P
politics – terrorism in Journeys from Berlin housing and urban
development in The Man Who Envied Women, amongst others. Whereas Journeys agonises, in the manner of advanced ’70s theory, as to whether the brute reality
of the political can ever be adequately represented on screen, The Man Who
Envied Women heralds a “new departure” for Rainer – the use of documentary
footage, “recording the actual confrontation ... rather than reporting it from
a greater distance”. (12) Naturally, this is no capitulation to any
simple kind of political realism – the footage is still fragmented,
contextualised, problematised and contradicted in the same manner as all
elements of the total montage. Trinh
T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989) is another political
documentary that works in this contemporary tradition.
Rainer has, in
one sense or another, always been a montage artist. Her films of the ’70s stage the contest of
different voices, spaces, positions, points-of-view – mainly within the sphere
of sexual politics – but with a no-win indecidability redolent of the
deconstructive and textual reveries of the time. As the political in her work
extends its points of reference in the ’80s, Rainer becomes a montage artist more akin to what we have
come to call the essay-film mode of Chris Marker, Ross
Gibson or Jean-Pierre Gorin. Characters (or figures), grabs/samples of
certain kinds of imagery or sound, still photographs, objects and architectural
sites – all represent various, more or less concrete discourses.
Textual
indecidability gets displaced and transformed into a newer problem of
attribution – what are the political strategies involved in being, or refusing
to be, a coherent identity (a subject) in certain places, times, situations? To
take one prominent example from The Man Who Envied Women of the
slip-sliding of political identity, American citizen Jackie Raynal stiffly
reciting, in heavy French accent, the text of Australian Meaghan Morris on Michel Foucault represents for
Rainer “the problematised voice of feminist theory itself”. (13)
The social situations Rainer describes are perhaps no-win
– not easily resolvable, or still incommensurable, as she would say. Rainer is
perhaps the greatest modern artist of incommensurability, the one who worries
it most sharply, profoundly and consistently. In The Man Who Envied Women,
a voice remarks: “I would feel I was being tricked into trying to deal with
things that have become incommensurable, as though they weren’t
incommensurable”. (14) The spaces and contradictions arising between personal
and political, immediate and historical, theory and practice, pleasure and
commitment – and many other binaries – gape like open wounds in her work.
At its extreme,
this concern over the incommensurable leads Rainer to a kind of paranoid
terrorism practiced on the minutiae of banal, everyday life – a resurfaced
puritanical panic about each one of us being found out, yet again, as
ideologically unsound (a politicised variant on Imposter Syndrome).
More broadly,
her films accept as a premise the potential richness – as well as the potential
abyss – of lived social contradictions.
Later, Rainer’s political conscience led her, in the context of prevalent discussions of postcolonialism and Third Cinema, to the concept of
interrogating one’s position of privilege (the title of her 1990 film), whatever the position and whatever the
privilege. “On a personal level I could describe my development as a gradual
discovery of the subtleties of my own privilege, which I took for granted when
I began as a dancer ... This is an on-going process and I feel I have just
begun to scratch the surface: not to try to escape my class or my sex, but to
constantly confront the facts of them.” (15)
Relating
montage form to political vision, Rainer gives the best indication of what
makes her work so vital and fascinating.
I’m talking about bad guys making
progressive political sense and good girls shooting off their big toe or mouth.
I’m talking about uneven development and fit in the departments of
consciousness, activism, articulation, and behavior that must be constantly reassessed by the spectator. I’m
talking about incongruous juxtapositions of modes of address: recitation,
reading, “real” or spontaneous speech, printed texts, quoted texts, et al., all
in the same film. I’m talking about representations of divine couplings and
(un)holy triads being rescreened only to be used for target practice. I’m
talking about not pretending that a life lived in potholes taking potshots will
be easy and without cost, on screen or off. (16)
1. Manny Farber
and Patricia Patterson, “New York Film Festival Review: Breaking Rules at the
Roulette Table”, Film Comment (November-December 1975), pp. 32-34, 57
(see p. 32); reprinted as “New York Film Festival: 1975” in Robert Polito
(ed.), Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (New
York: Library of America, 2009).
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2. B. Ruby
Rich, “Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction”, in Yvonne Rainer (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 1981); reprinted in Rich et al., The Films of Yvonne
Rainer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp.
1-23; see p. 1.
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3. Laleen
Jayamanne with Geeta Kapur and Yvonne Rainer, “Discussion: Modernity, ‘Third
World’, and The Man Who Envied Women”, Art & Text, no. 23 (March-May
1987), pp. 41-51; see p. 51.
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4. Rainer,
“More Kicking and Screaming from the Narrative Front/Backwater”, Wide Angle,
Vol. 7 No.1-2 (Spring 1985); reprinted in Rainer, A Woman Who ... : Essays,
Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999), pp. 207-213; see p. 211.
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5. Ibid., p.
210.
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6. Ibid., p.
208.
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7. Ibid.
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8. Rainer, “A
Likely Story”, Idiolects, no. 6 (June 1978); reprinted in A Woman Who
... , pp. 137-140; see p. 139.
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9. Noël
Carroll, “Film”, in Stanley Trachtenberg (ed.), The Postmodern Moment (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985); reprinted as “Film in the Age of
Postmodernism”, in Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 300-332; see p. 321.
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10. Rainer,
“More Kicking and Screaming”, p. 208.
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11. Ibid.
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12. Jayamanne
et al., “Discussion”, p. 48.
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13. Ibid., p. 44. back
14. Rainer, “The Man Who Envied Women”, in The Films of Yvonne Rainer, p. 216. back
15. Jayamanne
et al., “Discussion”, p. 51.
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16. Rainer,
“Some Ruminations Around Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal Net(tles) While
Playing With de Lauraedipus Mulvey, or, He May Be Off-Screen, but ...”, The
Independent , Vol. 9 No. 3 (April 1986); reprinted in A Woman Who ... ,
pp. 214-223; see pp. 220-221. Also reprinted in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis
& Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 188-197.
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© Adrian Martin June 1990 |
