Event
JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 with Yvonne Rainer in person!
Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer, who now lives much of the year in Los Angeles. One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles. Each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different moderator, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life. The fourth evening in the retrospective is January 17, 2010, and Rainer will be in conversation after the film with Simon Leung.
Sunday January 17, 2009, 7:30 pm
At the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles CA 90028
Admission $10 general, $6 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets:
Parking is now easiest at the Hollywood & Highland complex. Bring your ticket for validation. Parking is $2 for 4 hours with validation. Enter that complex on Highland or Hollywood. The theater is 1.5 blocks east.
JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1979, 125 minutes, 16mm, color)
Featuring Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Vito Acconci, Cynthia Beatt, Ilona Halberstadt, Vernon Gabor, Yvonne Rainer and many others.
To explore the ramifications of terrorism, Rainer employs an extended therapy session--in which an American woman speaks to a series of psychiatrists--to evoke the daily experiences of power and repression.
âRainer's film questions duplicitous rehabilitation (psychiatric care/control), the efficacy of radicalism, and conflicted political and personal motivations.
âThe collage essay technique of Journeys parallels the investigation of these conflicts on a formal level. She weaves the stories of 19th century Russian anarchists; the staging of identity as it occurs in therapeutic analysis, writing a diary or preparing a meal; and the fate of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), which exposed the precarious and enforced nature of West German democratic freedoms in the 1970s.â â kino 21, http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2218
âJourneys from Berlin/1971 is without a doubt the most ambitious, most risk-taking work of Rainerâs cinematic career.
âthe film is constructed out of a variety of filmic and literary materias. Its two major sections involve a psychoanalysis session, which occupies much of the screen time, and a kitchen conversation, which resembles a radio drama that we hear but never visually witness. The disjunction between the public and the private, always a central focus of Rainerâs work, here is made wider and more explicitthrough the counterpoint set up between the analysis session and the conversation about terrorism: the one an excavation of innermost fantasies and emotional traumas within an impersonal space, the other a debate of pressing social issues enacted as table-top repartee. The counterpoint weaves in and out of that tricky terrain wherein the individual psyche connects up to the historical body politic.â - B. Ruby Rich, from âYvonne Rainer: An Introductionâ in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 17)
Girlâs Voice: May 29th. I am so tired of this wrangling. Tonight it started with Daddyâs anarchist friendsâ conscientiousness and ended with menâs sexual potency. My mindâs whirling. I donât know whatâs wrong. I feel so phlegmatic.â From Journeys from Berlin/1971 screen play, in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 135)
On Yvonne Rainer:
When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. 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, âThe most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.â
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival DâAutomne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.
In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Criticsâ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakersâ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Rainerâs films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.
A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO... was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.
In the Spring of 1997âto coincide with the release of MURDER and murderâcomplete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainerâs memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life.
She most recently presented new dance works at REDCAT in June 2009.
Source: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/director.php?director_id=8
Simon Leung is an artist who works across disciplines and mediums. His projects have been exhibited in the Guangzhou Triennial (2008); the Venice Biennale (2003); the Whitney Biennial (1993); the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and the Generali Foundation in Vienna. In 2008, Leung received a Guggenheim fellowship in post-Studio art and the Art Journal Award for his essay "The Look of Law." In 2009 Leung danced in two versions of Yvonne Rainer's "Trio A"--as a part of "Trio A in ten easy lessons," a group performance at the Barclay Theater; and in "Simon Leung dances Yvonne Rainer," a solo performance for the PERFORM! NOW! Festival in Los Angeles. He has taught in the Studio Art Department at UC Irvine since 2001.
Two extended articles on Yvonne Rainer on Senses of Cinema:
âYvonne Rainerâ by Erin Brannigan
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/rainer.html
âFrom Objecthood to Subject Matter:
Yvonne Rainer's Transition from Dance to Filmâ by Jonathan Walley
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/rainer.html
Another biography of Rainer:
http://people.wcsu.edu/mccarneyh/fva/R/YRainer_bio.html
Four more screenings in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective upcoming in 2010:
Feb 14 - Kristina Talking Pictures
Feb 21 - Lives of Performers and Trio A (with Rainer present)
March 21 - MURDER and murder (with Rainer in person with Catherine Lord)
March 28 - Privilege (with Rainer in person with Adam Hyman)
This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque
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LocationSpielberg Theater at the Egyptian
6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
United States
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