Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 Rainer presented her choreography throughout the U.S. and Europe.
In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph work for the White Oak Dance Project, including a 35-minute piece called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers (1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Adam Pendleton's Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer is the third in a series of video portraits, following My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard, the former chief of staff for the Black Panthers, and Lorraine O'Grady: A Portrait. ...
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Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer chronicles the defiant, uncompromising, and highly influential ideas of postmodern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Over the course of her career, she revolutionized modern dance, generated what later ...
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Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others d ...
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Salomania reconstructs a dance: the 'dance of the seven veils' from Alla Nazimova's 1923 silent film Salomé. Also shown and rehearsed are sections from 'Valda's Solo,' which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova' ...
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"For me Rainer Variations is a hybrid: a weave of impressionistic portrait, found footage construction, and video sampler. Aside from formal issues, Yvonne Rainer's knotty process of thinking, her unique brand of humor, and her engaging presence are the th ...
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Privilege is an intelligently conceived, boldly anarchic, and wickedly insightful exposition on the culturally ingrained and socially divisive malaise of isms that artificially define and characterize empowerment in contemporary society: ageism, sexism, ec ...
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An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia. ...
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Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Sno ...
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Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 ...
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The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvon ...
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Kristina, a self-named Hungarian female lion tamer, arrives in New York to become a dance choreographer. Kristina, now a middle-class NYC artist concerned about the environment, has a sailor lover named Raoul. The film, a collage work, an essay film, a fic ...
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The film is about looking. I bet that slight variations of few recurrent elements would encourage the viewer to free associate and to fantasize a kind of narrative. ...
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Rainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger. ...
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Embodying Rainer's aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script readings, dance snippets, still photos, and tableaux vivants to explore issues of power and gender that influence the emotional lives of her performers. ...
Watch NowJudson Memorial Church on the occasion of the People's Flag Show, 1970. Film by Rudi Stern, John Reilly. Performers: David Gordon, Nancy Green, Barbara Dilley, Steve Paxton, Lincoln Scott, Yvonne Rainer. Video (black and white, sound). ...
Watch NowRainer's first film, Hand Film, was shot by fellow dancer William Davis when Rainer was confined to a hospital bed, recovering from major surgery and unable to dance. The resulting five minutes of footage is a sustained close-up shot of Rainer's hand again ...
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In I Cannot Now Recall, a collection of Yvonne Rainer's dreams are presented, selected by the filmmaker from Rainer's journals. Through choice and abstraction, the film produces a shared psychic landscape that is as expansive as it is anxious. ...
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Yvonne Rainer combines a dance performance she choreographed for Mikhail Barryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project in 2000 with texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—four of the most radical innovators in painting, ...
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Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifi ...
Watch NowPrivilege is an intelligently conceived, boldly anarchic, and wickedly insightful exposition on the culturally ingrained and socially divisive malaise of isms that artificially define and characterize empowerment in contemporary society: ageism, sexism, ec ...
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A Manhattan professor's (William Raymond, Larry Loonin) unseen artist wife mocks his pitiful existence. ...
Watch NowAn epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia. ...
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First performed in 1966, Trio A consists of an approximately five-minute sequence of discrete movements that, with the exception of walking, are never repeated. Although it appears effortless, the dance is painstaking to learn in its precise articulation o ...
Watch NowKristina, a self-named Hungarian female lion tamer, arrives in New York to become a dance choreographer. Kristina, now a middle-class NYC artist concerned about the environment, has a sailor lover named Raoul. The film, a collage work, an essay film, a fic ...
Watch NowRainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger. ...
Watch NowEmbodying Rainer's aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script readings, dance snippets, still photos, and tableaux vivants to explore issues of power and gender that influence the emotional lives of her performers. ...
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A blond woman (Susan Marshall) in white pants and shirt interacts with a moving round object and the camera. Camerawork by Phill Niblock. ...
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Ten minutes in an enormous chicken coop. Camerawork by Roy Levin. ...
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Two nudes, a man and a woman, interact with each other and a large balloon in a white living room. Performed by Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold. Camerawork by Phill Niblock. ...
Watch NowA volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions. ...
Watch NowRainer's first film, Hand Film, was shot by fellow dancer William Davis when Rainer was confined to a hospital bed, recovering from major surgery and unable to dance. The resulting five minutes of footage is a sustained close-up shot of Rainer's hand again ...
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