Yvonne Rainer,
A Woman Who…Essays, Interviews, Scripts.
Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press. 1999.
ISBN 0-8018-6078-4 (hb)
ISBN 0-8018-6079-2 (pb)
437pp.
US$45.00 (hb)
US$19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

A woman who…is the latest in a Paj publication series devoted to “art and performance” and the first to treat a filmmaker. Previously published volumes on theatre director Richard Foreman, playwright Reza Abdoh and performance artists Meredith Monk and Rachel Rosenthal established the model. Rainer has made the selections: a collection of public talks, published essays, artists’ statements, letters, interviews and screenplays for her sixth and seventh films Privilege (1990) and MURDER and murder.(1997). Ever the interjector Rainer has prefaced the reprints here with contextualising comments. The book is thus a history of a practitioner’s thought about why she makes things her way and not some other way. One finds in it much that risks being singular and personal: it mixes biography with critical theory, the occasional bluster with habitual irony, shaggy dog habits of mind with moments of lucid analysis. Reading it is like watching a Yvonne Rainer film.

The book is also a history of a conversation, or of several parallel conversations about the possibilities of narrative and the conditions for its working; about the emotions and language; relations between public and private selves, art and politics; the need for art to explore any subject matter and renovations of the idea of subject matter. But the principle conversation is that of everyday womanhood: the dimensions of being straight, being gay and being feminist, the conditions of these labels, the cultivation of one’s thinking about this. And these conversations are conducted in the context of cinema. Rainer opens the book with a thank you to “everyone with whom I’ve ever had a good conversation”.(ix) The conversational model is again close to the spirit of her films – great monologues, stray remarks, interjections, non sequiturs, the occasional lull into silence.

Tussling with narrative provides a continuing artistic stimulus for Rainer. As late as 1996 an essay dubbed “The avant-garde Humpty dumpty” declares “I do know that, like John Cage in relation to harmony, I must ‘devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’ In my case the wall is cinematic narrative”. (127) The Cage problematic was harmony, Rainer’s was unity. Reflecting on her first three films in 1978 she asked:

“What constitutes unity in a film? Can the narrative and other-than-narrative exist simultaneously in the same shot, creating a kind of strobe effect with regard to meaning. Can something – say, a tiger – at a narrative level be at once illustrative of the heroine’s vocation, symbolic of unknown danger, representative of endangered species – and at the same time function as an object of choreographic and cinematographic pattern-making.”(140)

The example is telling – the style of “radical juxtaposition’ allows for double or more meanings, an open-ended simultaneity of allusion without exclusion. The “tiger and the heroine’s vocation” hark back to Rainer’s third feature film Kristina Talking Pictures (1976) where Kristina the lion-tamer is also a kind of “everywoman” played by several different performers including the filmmaker herself.

Rainer first started playing with this strobe-effect of meaning when she introduced narrative-objects into her performances. The Grand Union Dreams(1971) performance featured a staircase going nowhere, a box, a suitcase – things that evoked an absent story. Her first feature film Lives of Performers (a melodrama) (1972) treated narrative incidents like objects:

“I was aware then that there was a certain amount of irony in calling this stripped down narrative with the barest hints of a story a melodrama. But in terms of where I had come from, these were very loaded terms to introduce: a murder, a woman’s rage, the other woman, the femme fatale, the gun, the suitcase. I had done this in dance with loaded objects – the mattresses in Parts of Some Sextets.”(73)

An object-like opacity of language – words held on screen for unexpected “emotional” durations, speech broken up into variously inflected quotations, monologues, odd exchanges (and incident) the pause given to actions by emotion – gave these early films their air of attenuated deliberations. Ruby Rich has argued that, with their unpredictable balance of stasis and pure movement, Rainer’s films replaced the cinema’s reliance on physical danger with emotional risk and physical action with text. While not disagreeing with this view, Rainer, in an interview reprinted here, identifies a moral political dimension in the contemplation arising from stillness, pauses and lengthy durations “where you listen and your mind starts going away … there is that type of possibility or hazard in making these kinds of films”. (77) As for the sculptural effect of separating out performance into its components of gesture, pose, facial expression, word and pure movement, Rainer’s interviews show her debt to minimalism and the insights she drew from her Judson theatre dance works: “one can’t do a walk without investing it with character”.(144)

Given an artistic trajectory as determined, clear-sighted and happily intransigent as this, why did narrative remain a problem for Rainer and under what guises did this problem present itself? The impression I have from reading this book – and the intricacy with which it rehearses arguments in this domain – is that Rainer’s narrative dilemma was paradoxical. On the one hand she seems, not alone in this, to have inherited the ambivalence held to narrative by philosophy and science. When narrative is used in philosophy it is traditionally an aside to the argument, precisely the role it was assigned in Rainer’s recent films as she became more and more a filmmaker of the discursive. But her ambivalence about narrative was inflected initially by the avant-garde exclusion of narrative from the field of dance, performance and experimental film, and later by the critique of ideology. Moreover both these anti-narrative tendencies defined narrative as inevitable sequences of events leading to psychological closure, a narrow definition that blinkered the critical enterprise Rainer identifies her work with. That critical enterprise, first, took as all of narrative what was just one traditional form and, second, didn’t see how this and other forms of narrative arise from an aspect of human conversation, that aspect we could call narration. (We can observe this happening inversely in, for instance, Film About a Woman Who…(1974) where eliminating the paradigmatic narrative reanimates narrative conversation.)

The problem of narrative thus dovetails for Rainer into the problem of her work vis a vis the institutionalised avant-garde (whether practitioners or theorists). But “sliding out of narrative and lurching back in” (85) as she put it in 1981 also inspires her work in film. To understand Rainer’s paradoxical critique/embrace of narrative we need to turn to a not unrelated aspect of her style – its spirit of contrariness. In a 1984 interview with Lyn Blumenthal Rainer comments, “I was not making a feminist analysis. I was making art based on various kinds of resistance, which now seems a highly political enterprise.” When Blumenthal asks of Film About a Woman Who… “well resistance to what, in opposition to what?”, Rainer replies, “Smug assumptions about what art should be – idealization of the dancer for instance”. She spells out the nature of this anti-idealist art, “the incorporation of debris, noise, silence, these low, so-called degraded art forms into the work. The introduction of pedestrian movement was in keeping with this impulse”. (74)

The disreputable character of narrative thus provides a good reason for using it – it is itself, in terms of the avant-garde, a “degraded” looked-down-on form. There’s also the connection between the refusal of narrative and the exclusion from the resulting art of autobiography and personal relations. Rainer comments that Lives of Performers pointed to the way Minimalism “couldn’t contain the ferment of personal relationships”.(260)

Rainer’s reaction to narrative idealization took the form of resistance to unity, harmony, closure, symmetry of characters and the idealised versions of screen femininity. (In fact her approach to the filming of women has been like that of her introduction of pedestrian movement into dance – seeing movie stars as like the idealised bodies of the classical dancer.)

This exploration of an anti-ideal screen treatment of women corresponded with an equation in Rainer’s work to the problem of narrative with the question of how to think about and film women. By 1982 Rainer was summarising her project as:

“a narrative dilemma, a dilemma that seems to deepen with each passing year. 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, I have just formulated an evolution which in becoming more explicitly feminist seems to demand a more solid anchoring in narrative conventions. (I’m not sure of the reason but I suspect the worst.) (208)

Here the 1982 essay “More kicking and screaming from the narrative front/back water” demonstrates the way thinking about narrative for Rainer became tied to theories about women. From the early eighties Rainer reappraises her artistic impulses in the light of feminist and narrative film theory. In a 1989 paper Rainer locates what I have called her “contrariness” in the Sontag-designated “adversarial culture” of the sixties avant-garde and calls for a rerouting of that “spirit of investigation” to ends “socially progressive rather than culturally hermetic”.(106) As Nancy Phelan comments in her introductory essay, with a “more solid anchoring in narrative conventions”, the conventions themselves are subject to an increasingly overt critique”.(12)

Certainly Rainer’s discussions of the films The Man who Envied Women (1985), Privilege and MURDER and murder are preoccupied with making equations between formal strategies and political purposes. Rainer turned in Privilege and MURDER and murder to making discursive essays with documentary elements – interviews, facts and statistics – that segue into narrative episodes. The spaciousness of the previous films has given way to a television-style focus on voice, body, information, agit-prop, sit-com and soap operatic dialogue. The screenplays for these films of the 1990s reveal a bluntness of tone and interrogative structure, a change tied to but not explained by Rainer’s turn to, on the one hand, discursive forms of narrative and documentary and, on the other, a first political and then sexual outing of herself as public lesbian.

A Woman Who… is in large part an exposition and explication leading to the thinking and experience represented in Privilege and MURDER and murder. The transformation from the films of the previous decade is startling. Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) and The Man who Envied Women were great studies of minds distressed by private circumspection and the requirements of social action. The recent films eclipse those concerns: they unhesitatingly equate individual experience with issues of public significance. To a large degree the politics of identity, sexual and ethnic, have replaced Rainer’s previous emphasis on moral ambivalence. Rainer also approaches academic feminist theory in a way that naturalizes it, so that its claims no longer seem provisional, as in fact like all theoretical claims they are. The recent films seem calculated to arrive at preordained conclusions when you read them as scripts (the dry inflections of the performers on screen make a difference to the political punch lines of the dialogue). Rainer’s preference for juxtaposition and quotation sometimes seems a rhetorical habit, a tendency to an urgent but undifferentiated criticality.

This volume confirms the extent to which Yvonne Rainer now measures her work in the light of feminist presumptions she previously tried to elude. The price of this energizing rhetoric is the loss of a certain temperament in the early work in which moral ambivalence is the source of fiercely expressed doubt. This is what I find moving or affecting in Rainer’s early films and it sometimes surfaces in writing here. On the always thwarted relations between art practice and critical thinking, the book confounds more than it resolves, a not undesirable state-of-affairs.

Gabrielle Finnane