Artists' Fellowship - 1995
Film
Artist Statement:
Over the years (since 1972) my films have dealt with a wide range of issues, both aesthetic and social. 'Privilege,' my sixth and latest feature film, begins with the impure matter of menopause. As it progresses, contradictory motifs begin to collide via informal interviews with women talking about their experience of menopause and aging, fragments from an old black and white 16mm educational film on menopause, titles shot off a Macintosh screen and a staged interview by a middle-aged African American documentary filmmaker ('Yvonne Washington') with her long-time white friend that turns into a Rashomon-like melodrama (a 'hot-flashback') of alleged interracial sexual violence and ill-fated romantic entanglement.
More about the Artist:
Yvonne Rainer won the MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.
Press about her film "MURDER and murder" (the image at right, on right side):
"MURDER and murder" might have been a chilly Brechtian exercise if the performances weren’t so luminously real. Ms. Merlin and Ms. Chalfant effortlessly evoke the sensibilities of people who have lived long enough to
know the preciousness of time.... And the movie is wonderful at showing not only how shared day-to-day activities ....form the fiber of a relationship,
but also how easily that fiber is torn...."MURDER and murder" shows how hard it is for two stubborn individuals to achieve a comfortable union whose attainment they both know is worth the struggle.
-Stephen Holden, New York Times, June 20, 1997
Rainer is a wonderful filmmaker with an amazing sense of film structure. This movie is tightly put together, and Rainer gets amazing performances from an excellent cast. There are sequences when Doris’ and Mildred’s story is
being eked out by Rainer’s multiple strategies that are as compelling as any in film. . . Watching Rainer invent a fiction, build it, partially dismantle it and then build it again is [a] real marvel.
-Richard Huntington, Buffalo News, April 25, 1997
Maybe, in a world far from our own, the challenging and kaleidoscopic “MURDER and murder” will have an open-ended run and “Air Force One” will play for two days.
-Betsy Sherman, The Boston Globe, September 19, 1997
To purchase works by or about Yvonne Rainer click below:
A Woman Who...: Essays, Interviews, Scripts
Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002
The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Theories of Representation and Difference) Support NYFA’s web site and programs by patronizing Amazon.com, which donates a percentage of all sales generated through this web site.
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