 |
|
|
|
|
Exhibitions
Yvonne Rainer, Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
May 5-August 8, 2004
Articles
Recasting 40 Years of America’s Creative Life
- Roberta Smith in The New York Times August 1, 2004
A comprehensive article in Senses of Cinema
by Erin Brannigan
Books By and About Yvonne Rainer
The Films Of Yvonne Rainer
(Indiana University Press, 1974)
A Woman Who... Essays, Interviews, Scripts
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73
(Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 1974)
Talking Pictures:
Filme, Feminismus, Psychoanalyse, Avantgarde (Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1994)
Radical Juxtaposition:
The Films Of Yvonne Rainer by Shelley Green (Scarecrow Press, New Jersey, 1994)
Critical Acclaim for the films of Yvonne Rainer
“Rainer is a fiercely non-compromising artist who learned to use the cinema’s magic and muscle to layer space and time in a completely non-naturalistic way.... She has always been as committed to emotional volatility and psychological meat-packing (topped with large doses of analysis) as any character-driven filmmaker. But her mode is more athletic, pummelling the viewer with associative motion picture collages made of language, cinematic space, character (as analytic tool), and story (as accretion). In this sense, Rainer’s narrative style owes as much to Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Buster Keaton as it does to Maya Deren and Michael Snow.”
- Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ART IN AMERICA, 1997
“Rainer is the avant-garde’s most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren...more likely, she’s the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York...That Rainer’s work engages that of Godard and Brakhage, arguably the two most powerfully original filmmakers of the past 30 years, is another measure of her centrality. But addicted as she is to the life of her times, it seems perverse to segregate Rainer in an avant-garde ghetto. The relationship of psychodrama to the films of actor-auteurs like Charlie Chaplin or Barbra Streisand is a fallow field for academics. Nevertheless, it’s apparent that...Rainer has many points of contact with her fellow toiler in the vineyards of urban sophistication, Woody Allen.”
- J. Hoberman, “The Purple Rose of Soho” VILLAGE VOICE, April 8, 1986
“Let me offer a further explanation... of what Rainer is being brilliant about this time... Rainer is interested in politics not as slogans but as daily life. She is interested in ideas not as objects of study but as actions of the mind and heart. She is interested in social roles not as fixed identities but as loyalties that can conflict and sometimes shift. She is interested in filmmaking not as a tool but as a toy, which is most useful when most surprising...”
- Stuart Klawans, THE NATION, January 28, 1991
“Yvonne Rainer’s films are as complex as thought, filled with unexpected images, snippets of sound and statements profound and silly-all competing for attention on the same plane of peception. It’s an approach that lets her meld wildly divergent topics into one film, to experiment with the limitations of the medium.”
- Chiori Santiage, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, September 9, 1990
“In an age of debonair and often apolitical postmodern art, Rainer has remained that rarest of creatures-a tough, critical, ever sceptical political artist.”
- Adrian Martin, MELBOURNE SUNDAY HERALD, August 5, 1990
“Yvonne Rainer’s work in the cinema can be seen as a milestone, marking a point of no return for women’s cinema and daring the cinema more generally to look for new directions. Her movies are so infused with the immediacy of personal struggle with life and its representations, that they resist monumental categorization or historic institutionalization. With a rare mixture of passion and irony, Rainer creates and then questions, making intricate patterns of restless instability. She guides the audience through stories, situations, characters and crises of all kinds with the deft hand of someone who knows her own minefield.”
- Laura Mulvey, 1989
|
|
|
|
|
|
