Author: DC (Page 124 of 1086)

Without René Crevel we would have lost one of the most beautiful pillars of surrealism. — André Breton

Crevel actually wrote only a single sentence: the long sentence of a feverish monologue from the pen of a Proust who dipped his biscuit laced with LSD into his tea, instead of the unctuous madeleine. — Angelo Rinaldi, L’Express

He will be read more and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the ‘great names’ that preceded him. — Ezra Pound

‘If you look at the photograph of leading Surrealist artists and writers, taken in 1932 at Tristan Tzara’s, you will find René Crevel in the back row, and that is where he long remained. The others, including Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and Paul Eluard, all seem to know what to do with their hands, whereas René Crevel is leaning forward, one hand placed for support on the shoulder of Max Ernst, the other on that of Man Ray. Born in 1900, the golden boy of the Surrealist movement, Crevel is perhaps remembered more for having killed himself than for his writings, though even in death he is surpassed by other suicides, by the revolver-brandishing Jacques Vaché, for instance, whose myth was sedulously fostered by Andre Breton. Why, then, has David Rattray chosen to publish now a translation of Crevel’s autobiographical novel, La Mort difficile, sixty years after its first appearance in 1926? The answer to that question may well have as much to do with a certain climate of opinion that has flourished since the Sixties as with Crevel’s undoubted talent as a writer.

‘It was in 1947 that Jean-Paul Sartre accused the Surrealists, who deeply influenced him, of being young men of good social position who were hostile to daddy. Crevel senior, however, hanged himself in 1914, and his young son was left under the domination of a mother he loathed and who is caricatured as the odious and pretentious Mme. Dumont-Dufour in La Mort difficile. Still, unlike many of the budding Surrealists in the Twenties, Crevel was indeed well-to-do and well connected. He was a great friend of the Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure, who financed the notorious film, L’Âge d’or, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali; and it was he who introduced the inventor of limp watches to one of the earliest of that artist’s princely patrons.

‘Crevel appears indubitably handsome in the portrait photograph by Man Ray, and in fine line drawings of the period. His looks were of a type that should have given him a role in one of Cocteau’s later films, had he survived and if Breton and Cocteau had not been at daggers drawn. One of Crevel’s friends, the Surrealists’ ally, André Thirion, remarked in his memoirs on the engaging personality and polished charm of the author of La Mort difficile. André Breton’s portrait of his associate is more somber: it stresses the disquiet and the complexity of the young man’s character.

‘In his books Crevel made no secret of his homosexuality or bisexuality. As for Breton, he wrote paeans to heterosexual love, and like most of the Surrealists he viewed homosexuality with disfavor, although the colleagues tolerated what they regarded as an aberration in their friend. It is plain from Crevel’s highly personal narrative, Mon Corps et moi (“My Body and Me”), that the young author felt deeply divided about his sexual proclivities. Moreover, he had long suffered from ill health: tuberculosis took him at frequent intervals to boredom in Swiss sanatoria, and his sickness was complicated by alcohol and drugs (opium, cocaine). The theme of suicide haunted him. In his very first book, Détours (1924), he imagined the scenario of death by gas that he was to follow eleven years later in 1935. With Man Corps et moi, he betrays his doubts about the reality of his own existence.

‘The great event of Crevel’s life was his meeting with André Breton in 1921: a strong, aggressive character under whose aegis the Surrealist enterprise often appears as a succession of insults, cuffs to celebrated heads, and expulsions. Crevel made an important contribution to the movement and yet he also figures as its victim. Having been initiated into spiritualism by an aristocratic English lady, he introduced Breton to “hypnotic sleep,” which played so large a role in the development of Surrealism and its use of automatic writing or image-making. In a deep sleep, Crevel declaimed, sang, yet apparently he had no memory of what had passed. These experiments led the young writer to try to hang himself, and Breton put an end to them. In the famous “Inquiry into Suicide,” conducted by La Révolution surréaliste, Crevel eloquently justified suicide as a solution to his dissatisfaction with his life.

‘The risks involved in Surrealist practices, such as the debate on suicide and the rehabilitation and simulation of madness, are obvious. The extravagant declarations of Breton—that “living and not-living are imaginary solutions,” or that the distinction between true and false, good and evil, is “absurd”—must have had a harmful effect on one like Crevel, whose hold on life was so precarious. The whole objective of Surrealism was to undermine reason and logic. Crevel could write a book paradoxically entitled L’Esprit contre la raison (“Mind against Reason”), but he valued highly his own critical intelligence and, having worked on a thesis on Diderot while at the Sorbonne, he never lost interest in the eighteenth century as the age of enlightenment.

‘Meanwhile, profoundly loyal to André Breton, he was among those who “gave proof of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM,” as Breton’s first Manifesto has it. Only too well known is Breton’s concept of absolute Surrealist revolt: to go down into the street with a revolver and to fire haphazardly into the crowd. Time and experience have not been kind to such irresponsible language, and too much real blood has been shed in the streets for Breton’s words to be regarded as mere ink. One difference between words and paint is that words have meaning and, however “poetic,” cannot be totally divorced from reason and logic. Perhaps that is why some Surrealist art tends to make a greater impact than a good deal of strictly Surrealist literature. Certainly, the confusion in Crevel’s mind between unreason and reason must have been acute.

‘A way out of the impasse appeared to be at hand for intellectuals in revolt: adherence to the Revolution and membership in the Communist Party. Crevel discovered Marx and dialectical materialism, and he began to quote chunks from Engels and Lenin in his writings. He was among those who wrote for the periodical Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, doubtless believing with Breton that to propagate the idea of revolution would hasten the advent of the great cataclysm. In 1927 the author of La Mort difficile joined the French Communist Party; he was expelled in 1933 and readmitted in 1934. None worked harder than he did to try to reconcile the mistrustful party hacks and the would-be revolutionary Surrealists or, as it was then put more grandly, “Communism and Culture.” His efforts to establish harmony during the preparations for the Communist-inspired First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935 were thwarted by the exchange of insults and slaps between Ilya Ehrenburg and André Breton, which led to the author of the Surrealist Manifestos being denied permission to speak. This Congress proved to be one of the early successes of Stalinism in the international cultural sphere. There was in fact no way of reconciling such fundamentally opposing attitudes to free thought and free expression.

‘Crevel’s failure to secure agreement between Surrealists and Communists is thought to be one contributing cause of his suicide. Shortly before his death, the former Communist André Thirion had expounded privately—much to Crevel’s surprise—his own conviction that Stalin represented as much of a threat to culture as Hitler. When Crevel stayed with Dali at his home at Port-Lligat, the painter could not have been very helpful when employing his “paranoia-criticism” to provoke “the maximum number of hopeless antagonisms in every situation.” Meanwhile, Crevel was becoming more critical of Andre Breton, and was losing faith in Surrealism, as his letters to Tristan Tzara of 1934-35 reveal. An adverse medical report prompted the young novelist to write: “Please have my body cremated. Disgust,” and to take his own life.

‘There is a certain irony in prefacing Difficult Death with Dali’s memoir of 1954, as David Rattray has done. Crevel would have hated Dali’s support for General Franco: he himself was keenly opposed to fascism, having helped to create a committee of anti-fascist writers at the time when the French fascists almost overthrew the government in February 1934. It is equally ironic to find Ezra Pound’s essay on Crevel, with its laudatory reference to Mussolini and its refrain on usury, being used to preface a reprint of Crevel’s satirical novel, Les Pieds dans le plat (“Putting One’s Foot In It”). Crevel forcefully expressed his hatred of anti-Semitism and Hitler in that novel, and his detestation of Mussolini elsewhere.

‘With La Mort difficile, written in the year of his mother’s demise, Crevel probes the conflict within the mother-fixated Pierre. The protagonist is torn between his ambivalent regard for the self-sacrificing Diane and his passion for Arthur Bruggle, an equivocal American modeled on the painter Eugene MacCown, to whom the author was devoted. Dreamlike elements and a rather mannered insistence on repetition betray the work’s Surrealist connection. Black humor merges with self-pity. David Rattray’s translation is at times ingenious. However, Pierre’s mother admires slim legs as a token of breeding (signe de race), not of “race.” In her prejudiced vocabulary, “foreigner” is too anodyne a word for the pejorative métèque. A reference to the poet Lamartine, hero of the Second Republic, is eluded: Crevel liked to satirize the liberal “Lamartinian current,” otherwise graciously qualified as “the dustbins of liberalism.” To find an equivalent for the American’s amusingly painful misuse of French genders looks impossible. One realizes how skillful, witty, and idiosyncratic Crevel’s use of language can be. He had no small talent as a punster, satirist, and polemicist.

‘After the événements of May 1968 there was a revival of Crevel’s work in France in the Seventies, when several of his books were reprinted. One admirer went so far as to declare: “The explosion of May [1968] places the figure of Crevel, that dark archangel, in the forefront of those who refuse to live divided against themselves.” A curious observation, surely, since in Crevel’s case that refusal meant self-immolation. The rebellious author of Babylone could serve as model for a new generation of rebels. He, too, was opposed to religion, family, country (in whose name so many had perished in the 1914-18 War), and all existing institutions.

‘High among his pet hates were liberal parliamentary democracy, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. His terminology sometimes recalls that of fashionable theorists of the Sixties and after. When he excoriates the privileged swine (salauds) or invokes “oceans of wrath” to drown the bourgeoisie and all its works, he sounds like a precursor of Sartre and his heirs. Crevel’s heady combination of revolt, homosexuality, and drug-taking doubtless remains in vogue in certain circles even today.’ — Renee Winegarten

 

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Gallery

Portrait of René Crevel, by Dora Maar

Andre Breton (l) talks with Rene Crevel (second from right), while Salvador Dali (second from left) and Paul Eluard (r) look on.

by Man Ray

Tristan Tzara and René Crevel, 1928

by Gertrude Stein

Front row: Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray. Back row: Paul Eluard, Hans Arp, Yves Tanguy, Rene Crevel, 1933.

by unknown

René Crevel et Marie-Laure de Noailles, Paris, ca 1930

Yves Tanguy and René Crevel

by Christian Bérard

Jacqueline Chaumont (Mouth) and Rene Crevel (Eye) in dadaist play ‘Coeur

by unknown

 

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Further

Rene Crevel @ goodreads
René Crevel, dandy révolutionnaire
‘ALL ABOARD FOR RATAPOILOPOLIS’
Lettre de René Crevel à Gertrude Stein
Elle ne suffit pas l’éloquence, René Crevel
RENÉ CREVEL AU SOMMET DE SA MONTAGNE MAGIQUE
Book: ‘A Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel’, by Peter Dubé
RC’s ‘Babylon’ @ 50 Watts
“Si je ne réussis rien, je me tuerai”: René Crevel inédit
‘Notes en vue d’une psycho-dialectique’, by Rene Crevel
‘Freud de l’Alchimiste à l’Hygiéniste’, by Rene Crevel
Des nouvelles de Crevel
René Crevel: un po’ angelo, un po’ boxeur
René Crevel: Las hermanas Brontë hijas del viento
René Crevel, risposta all’inchiesta sul suicidio e frammento da “Il clavicembalo di Diderot”
Rene Crevel’s grave
Buy ‘My Body and I’

 

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Extras

trailer for LA MORT DIFFICILE starring Brandon Slagle. From the book by RENE CREVEL

Cafe life in Paris, 1927 w/ Pola Negri, Man Ray, Eugene McCown, René Crevel, a.o.

René Crevel – L’Esprit contre la raison / Écrits sur l’art – Artracaille 02-10-2012

 

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Is Suicide a Solution?
by Rene Crevel

A solution? Yes.

People say one commit suicide out of love, fear, or venereal disease. Not so. Everyone is in love, or thinks they are. Everyone is frightened. Everyone is more or less syphilitic. Suicide is a means of conscious choice. Those who commit it are person unwilling to throw in the towel like almost everyone else and repress a certain psychic feeling of such intensity that everything tells you had better believe it is a truthful and immediate sense of reality. This sense is the one thing that allows a person to embrace a solution that is obviously the fairest and most definitive of them all, the solution of suicide.

There is no love of hate about which one can say that it is clearly justified and definitive. But the respect (which in spite of myself and not withstanding a tyrannical moral and religious upbringing) I have to have for anyone who did not timorously withhold or restrain that impulse, that mortal impulse, leads me to envy a bit more each day those persons who were hurting so intensely that a continuing acceptance of life’s little games became something they could no longer stomach. Human accomplishment is not worth its weight in horse mucus. When personal happiness leads to even a modicum of contentment, this is more often than not a negative things like a sedative against me. The death that tempted me several times was lovelier by far than this downright prosaic fear of death that i might also quite properly call a habit the habit of timidity. I wanted to open a certain door, and I got cold feet. I feel I was wrong not to open it. I not only feel, I believe, I want to feel, I want to believe it was a mistake not to, for asI have found no solution in life, notwithstanding a long and diligent search, I am not about to attempt to pull myself together to give life another try unsolaced by the thought of this definitive and ultimate act in which I feel that I have caught a glimpse at least of the solution.

 

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Carpets

‘René Crevel, a youth amongst his artistic peers, was a handsome, tragic figure full of passion, creativity and nostalgia. Crevel exercised his diverse skills when he collaborated with Paul Follot to design modernist tapestries for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne in Paris. Tragically, Crevel took his own life just before his 35th birthday, and left behind only a small number of masterworks in the disciplines of tapestry design and the literary arts.’ — collaged

 

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Book

René Crevel My Body and I
Archipelago Books

‘In My Body and I (Mon Corps et Moi, 1925), René Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being. Exploring the tension between body and spirit, Crevel’s meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry, truth, and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator’s Romantic mind moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. A Surrealist Proust.’ — Archipelago Books

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Excerpt

 

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p.s. RIP Steve Albini. What a big shock. ** Dominik, Hi!!! This is your big chance to show Vienna why it’s insane that its citizens don’t bathe themselves in the glory of Halloween every year. You could change lives and life itself for the better. Of course I should do the same thing with Paris, but, like you, I would imagine, I have no idea how. We did talk to the producers, and, as usual, we got about 1/100th of the information and satisfaction the we sought. It’s a start? (It’s always just a start with them). The mouse is now making its new home wherever that is after accidentally wandering into our humane trap yesterday. But I’m positive that some chum of his or hers or theirs will be poking its head out of somewhere any minute now. Love convincing my friend Ange to go see the new ‘Planet of the Apes’ with me today, G. ** Jamie F, Hi, Jamie! Lovely to meet you, and thank you breaking the blog’s ice. Gosh, thank you so much for the very kind words about my work. That’s so cool. I’m especially happy you singled out ‘The Marbled Swarm’ because that’s my favorite of mine. Naivete is kind of beautiful, but if you’re glad yours is in your past, then I’m happy to have assisted you. Defence mechanisms, that’s actually a pretty good guess, I think. Huh. Can you say anything more about your writing and your aspirations as a writer? I’d be interested to know. It’s great to get to know and make friends with fellow writers. And, yes, it’d be nice to meet. Where do you live? Is Paris on your agenda per chance? Anyway, thank you again, Jamie. It’s a real pleasure to get to talk with you. ** GrabBag and Greeny? Why?! :/., Hi. Finishing is the best. We’re so, so, so close to finishing the film and being prevented from finishing it by powers beyond our control, and it’s driving us nuts, but we have to patient, I guess. The short fiction book will come out in, I think, July. Oh, I meant dangerously promising because of what your description of him seemed to portend. I guess it could be argued that every kiss is an experiment? ** _Black_Acrylic, Happy you dug what you saw of hers. I did read that about the Ballard inspiration, which seemed very surprising. Yes, RIP Albini. Really didn’t anticipate that. ** Jack Skelley, Hi. Oh, my little book is called ‘Flunker’, so you were sort of vaguely close. I think I’ll finally get my paws on Bob’s physical book tomorrow amidst dinner with Ms. Tarasoff herself. Obviously, now you have to explain to me what a ‘group-grope reading/travesty’ is or was. Flip is a good nickname for you. I’m going to start calling you that. Yours truly, Red Skelton. ** Misanthrope, Gosh, see, I like it when dads call their sons ‘buddy’. I’m touched by the manners in which heterosexual males express affection to each other. I find it tender in a rich and indefinable way. How did your presentation go? Did they say, ‘Thanks, buddy’ afterwards? There are the curious non-diverging tastes, it’s true. Like … I can’t think of any, ha ha, but I remember us having ‘high five’ moments over certain things. ** Steve, Thanks for the link. I’ll hope to use it. Everyone, Tip from Steve: ‘The Prismatic Ground festival is streaming shorts online here. They can be viewed anywhere in the world.’ How was ‘Chime’? I finally watched that documentary ‘The Wolf Pack’ last night. Such a fascinating situation and lovely group of kids. ** James Bennett, Hi. I’ve never liked Whitman. I can’t stand his stuff honestly. He just seems like a blowhard to me, or rather his thing is really not mine. I will extremely skip that immense Sartre book, Jesus. How strange of him. Yeah, Paris, for all of its size, really feels like a small town, at least when you live here. In a way that I love after spending most of my life in gigantic LA where walking is a compartmentalised activity by default. Anyway, cool you’re coming over. Hit me up for a coffee or a communal stroll if you like. I have ‘Fuccboi’ on my hunt list. Thanks again. I hope all is progressive with your writing and everything else too. ** Bill, Nice stuff, her stuff. Cool about the latest ritual. The only French ritual I know of is everyone leaving for the countryside at the lightest drop of the smallest hat. Yes, RIP Albini. Really sucks, still so young, fuck. ** Harper, Hi. The French are seriously into futbol too, and they can get pretty loud about it, but they don’t get angry and self-hating and explosive when their team loses, at least that I’ve been able to detect. When they lost the World Cup a couple of years ago, 3/4 of a million people gathered just down the street from me in Concorde to chant and wave hands and show their love for their losing team. Which was odd in its own way as well. I think ‘best dialogue writer of all time’ is a monicker that she almost certainly deserves, yes. I’m so glad you like her. I go on Kinks jags too. ‘Village Green’ is my favorite as well. ‘Something Else’ is great. I even like, in a hit and miss way, a lot of the later ‘Preservation’ -> ‘Schoolboys in Disgrace’ era songs. After that, I feel like the greatness kind of fully waned. But maybe you have late period tips? I kind of like the heavily Kinks-influenced Jam songs, even though they’re kind of stiff. Happy Thursday! ** Justin D, Hey, Justin. I hope it found a suitable home. I trust that its survival instincts and ingenuity re: spacial possibilities are strong. I like slow burn films, so I’ll put ‘La Chimera’ on the possible future agenda. Thanks. Loss gets to me too, so it should be good. Zac’s and my film has a ‘loss’-oriented ending that tears me up, at least. ** Brightpath, Okay, I’ll do #1 and then skip to #4 and then, if I’m still jonesing I’ll fill in the middle section. I don’t mind cheesy CGI. Well, depending. Good luck closing out the school term. Robbe-Grillet, nice! My fave is ‘Recollections of the Golden Triangle’, I think partly because I like the name so much for some reason. (Of course in the original French it probably has a completely different title). ** Uday, Knock on wood. Congrats on hitting the 50% mark on college. What does that mean, two more years or … ? I’m not a fan of Ginsberg’s stuff after ‘Howl’ and that early era, no. Ginsberg and I got along okay until one of his boyfriends dumped him for me, and then we didn’t get along after that. Well, I would think that giving him time to think would work in your favor, but, yeah, tightly crossed fingers. Has he decided yet? That’s a pretty off-putting ‘come on’ approach right there, yes. Yow. ** Right. Today’s post is devoted to the brilliant and doomed young French writer René Crevel. See you tomorrow.

 

‘A pioneering figure of the avant garde movement, Yvonne Rainer’s artistic career spans over five decades across both dance and film. Making use of archives, reenactments, photographs, and unconventional audiovisual techniques, her films draw on critical theory and erudite analysis while exploring deeply personal, political, and social themes. Her genre-defining work and collaboration with other artists has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships, among other accolades. Rainer is widely regarded as one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century; as critic J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in 1986, “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.”’ — Zeitgeist Films

‘Yvonne Rainer is a key figure in the field of American experimental cinema, having found herself gradually but inexorably drawn to the medium of film and the new avenues of exploration it opened up. Her artistic awakening was strongly influenced by the films of Maya Deren (1917-1961), Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), whom she discovered at the beginning of her dancing career. From 1967 she started to interweave film and dance into her choreography and viewed her short films as an extension of her work with the body. It was however her increasing interest in the narrative as well as the treatment of emotions and the private sphere that led her to direct her first feature-length film, Lives of Performers (1972). The film, which draws a parallel between a melodramatic love triangle and the everyday life of dancers, is conceived as a choreography in its own right.

‘Y. Rainer’s ensuing cinematographic career went on to reflect a biting political and theoretical awareness, attuned to the revolts and struggles of her time. Film About a Woman Who… (1974) and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), for instance, which portray the power games at play in romantic heterosexual relationships, highlight her proclaimed feminist agenda; The Man Who Envied Women (1985) found its inspiration in the feminist theories of the cinema but also condemned the housing crisis in New York and American imperialism in Central America; Privilege (1990) analyses the implications of menopause for women and criticises the prevailing fictions linked to race and sex; MURDER and murder (1996), for its part, questions the establishment of a lesbian identity.

‘By setting her subjective experience against historical events, Y. Rainer’s recurrent references to autobiographical elements seem to encapsulate the feminist slogan, the personal is political. Her filmmaking is never didactic but challenges and criticises political or theoretical discourse by juxtaposing an ironic parody of multiple voices and ideas. In so doing, she embraces the narrative while transgressing its codes, creating a polyphonic, non-linear collage that favours the text rather than the image and leaves her audience entirely free to fix its own interpretation. Having resumed her choreographic career in the 2000s, Y. Rainer’s complex, polysemic cinematographic oeuvre stands as a vital landmark in the history of experimental cinema.’ — Johanna Renard

 

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Stills

 

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Further

The Yvonne Rainer Collection
Yvonne Rainer @ IMDb
YR @ MUBI
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer
‘I was never interested in being famous’: dance legend Yvonne Rainer on her gloriously weird film career
Yvonne Rainer, juxtaposition radicale
A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer
Lives of Performers: The Films of Yvonne Rainer
Book: ‘The Films of Yvonne Rainer’
YR @ Letterboxd
Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
From Objecthood to Subject Matter: Yvonne Rainer’s Transition from Dance to Film
Filming the Unspeakable: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
Looking back on the oeuvre of Yvonne Rainer, iconoclast and artistic visionary
Yvonne Rainer and Queering Failure

 

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Extras

Film Society Talks | Yvonne Rainer and Lynne Tillman

Yvonne Rainer: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies; a Rant Dance

Yvonne Rainer, Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics?

 

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Interview
from The Paris Review

 

INTERVIEWER In the mid-1960s, you went through a process of gradual disenchantment with performing and being a performer, of being looked at. How did that come about?

RAINER Well, we’re now getting into my transition to film. I guess I began to deal with the limitations of the kind of movement I was capable of, and was interested in, which was not about storytelling and it was not about metaphor—I mean, it was very much influenced by Minimalism. Feminism was coming along and I was reading all these essays about patriarchy and I began to think about narrative and film. I had followed experimental film from the 1950s when I was in San Francisco as a very young person. I had seen the films of Maya Deren at the San Francisco Museum of Art as early as 1953. When I came to New York in 1956, I was still following experimental film. By the mid-1960s and early 70s Warhol was making films and there was a movement called “The New American Cinema”, including Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, among others. I began to see the possibilities for combining some of these experimental techniques in 16 mm film with narrative fragments, which bring us to my first feature film Lives of Performers (1972). In it, a lot of things happen: you have my dance background of utmost simplicity that becomes the embodiment of the spoken story about a man who can’t make up his mind between two women. And you have a kind of disingenuousness. I came to this material with a consciousness of Hollywood melodrama, but also of a kind of absurdity—maybe from my background in theater looking at [Eugène] Ionesco and certainly from looking at [Jean Luc] Godard’s films. Throughout the film there’s no sync sound. The performers went by their own names—Shirley, Valda, and Fernando. I gave them pages from the script, which was very disjunctive, and I said, “Oh, this passage I really like the way I’ve written it, so just read it or improvise.” So, in a close-up of Valda [Setterfield], with her voice over, she improvises a story about going to John’s house, making it up as she goes along. There was a performance that preceded the film. It was concurrent with my editing of the film and a rough cut of the film was shown as part of this performance. We sat in front of it and read, or improvised from the script and that was recorded and became the soundtrack for it. You also hear the audience’s response—you hear them laugh, for instance. I could have put in a laugh track, but it’s the actual audience at the dance concert that you hear and also us laughing at certain moments. For instance, there was a previous sound taping as the performers watched themselves for the first time in a private screening. We recorded their responses and in the film, at a certain point, there’s a big close-up of Shirley where she says, “Oh, I look like an old-fashioned movie star!” She had never seen herself on film before. So I incorporated those spontaneous things into the soundtrack.

INTERVIEWER One of the principle things that happens in film and on stage is the coming together of the framing of time and the framing of space, two elements that you seem to have been working with all along. In theater the framework is however big the room is, and an important factor is also whether it has seating or not—at Judson Theater, for instance, people walked through the dance space to get to it—but the framing within the frame of the film is a different thing entirely.

RAINER Yes, you’re right. One of the things that drew me to film was framing the possibilities for a very exact framing of the body.

INTERVIEWER The framing of sound or the deframing of sound respond to the same artistic strategy. Breaking synchronization is another way of deframing sound.

RAINER Right. You can’t do that in live theater.

INTERVIEWER That brings me to other formal devices that occur in your work a good deal; namely doubling and splitting. For example, you seem to split personalities and also double them. As a result, one is never watching a fully integrating character doing a fully consistent thing. One always sees variations. How did that come about? What kind of concept, inclination or impulse led you to that?

RAINER I wasn’t interested in illusionistic conventions of narrative cinema as practiced in Hollywood, or any kind of narrative film—where sound corresponds to the lips and to what actually comes out of the actor’s mouth. When I started out, I didn’t want to use actors: they gave me either too much or too little. And I didn’t know how to direct—I still don’t know how to direct. By the time I was through, in 1996, I was using professional actors, but at this earlier time I used the people who had worked with me in dance. Some of them were trained dancers, some of them were not—for example, Valda Setterfield was dancing with Merce Cunningham at the time. I had to think about devices for telling a story and since I wasn’t interested in a plot—with exposition, development, climax, and dénouement according to traditional classical theater, I had to find ways to keep this thing within ninety minutes, with all these fragments of my experience, fragments of things I’d read, quotes and so on. I began to explore new devices and strategies. All my films—all seven of them—deal with some kind of performance or time-based activity. Sometimes the main character is a video artist, or a choreographer, or a dancer. So there are all these performances within the thread or the body of the film. In Film About a Woman Who … (1974), there are two men and two women and they refer only to “he” or “she” so you never know which one is being referred to. I kept mixing it up to create these ambiguities in terms of plot and yet the language had an air of authenticity about it. For instance, the little story in Lives of Performers is autobiographical. There’s a great deal of revamped autobiography in all my films.

INTERVIEWER Your film The Man Who Envied Women (1985) is very much about the theorization of sexuality, of identity. It is about a man who becomes a theoretical feminist and yet treats women in a way that suggests he hadn’t studied his own books. At what point does theory become a tool and when is it also a means of expression?

RAINER Well, Laura Mulvey’s famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was a kind of lodestone for me in the mid 1970s and the film that came out of that was The Man Who Envied Women playing on the penis envy that Freud propagated in relation to women’s sexuality or men’s sexuality—castration and all that. The theories about certain genres of Hollywood film affected women filmmakers and theorists of the next ten years or so. It was a critique of the way women are objectified in the Hollywood movies from the forties and fifties. So I began collecting clips from Hollywood movies in which women were complicit in being demeaned or objectified by men. These clips became the backdrop for the main character, who was in some kind of therapy, and they became his cultural unconscious. For instance, I included clips of Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939) saying to her doctor, “I have been a good girl” and acting like a little girl. In my film Privilege (1990), I dealt with race and female menopause in the same vehicle, which was a very difficult thing to pull off. So much so that I nearly gave it up. In it, there is a white middle-class woman dealing with characters of color who are also working class. There are a lot of quotations from writers in this work of mine—a lot of printed material is read.

INTERVIEWER Maybe you can talk a little bit about the importance of text in your work. In Film About a Woman Who … there’s a scene where the camera comes in on your face and there are words being spoken that seem to have an entirely independent existence. Objectified language is an important element with which you often play.

RAINER Yes, that’s true. I’ve been compared to Woody Allen for the way in which my characters often talk—they are educated, liberal. The Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero’s horror movie, is one of the clips playing in the background in The Man Who Envied Women. I had gone to a midnight screening of that film and at the end of it, the lights came up in the theater and two guys were going at each other in the front row. The power of that kind of horror stayed in my mind. Romero’s film is about a black man defending people from monsters who have returned from the dead. They are the undead. In my piece, two actors play the same character and I ended up calling him Jack Deller. Then there’s the female character, Tricia, who has split up with him. (I should mention that, at the beginning, I chose to include a clip of Tricia Brown dancing.) In my piece I take her physical presence out of the picture. I was influenced by critiques of the oversexualization of women in Hollywood movies and so I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll take her out totally, and she’ll be a controlling voice,” since very often in film noir a man’s voice is the controlling voice. So there’s a telephone conversation she has with her brother and her sister-in-law who she doesn’t get along with—which is not my case, since I get along fine with my sister-in-law. I do have a brother and I had had this conversation with him after seeing the French film The Mother and the Whore which I found very powerful. So you hear a conversation about one film and you see another film, The Night of the Living Dead, and you see the whole audience for that film getting very riled up and fighting in the theater.

 

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13 of Yvonne Rainer’s 14 films

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Hand Movie (1966)
‘Rainer made this film in a hospital bed while recovering from surgery. Hand Movie would become part of the series Five Easy Pieces, which affirms the tenets of her 1965 No Manifesto: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity.” At the time, Rainer saw her films as experiments rather than completed artworks. Here, the hand movements become increasingly complex until they relax again into a flat position. Shown from all sides, the hand is treated with a sculptural approach.’ — MoMA

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Volleyball (1966)
‘A 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. Brilliant mockery of sports which captures their inherent emptiness when all the imagined drama is stripped away. Ludicrous and intentionally boring in a way that perfectly echoes the way I feel when I watch a sport I don’t care about. Clever and absurd in its simplicity.’ — andy_chandler3003

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Trio Film (1968)
‘Trio Film consists of a four-and-a-half-to-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 of hands, arms, shoulders, feet, and legs. It is a signature work by Rainer, who in the 1960s transposed to dance the ideas that were then giving shape to the era’s Minimalist sculpture and painting, abandoning the aesthetics of classical and modern dance—which were rooted in virtuosic technique and expression—in favor of an unenhanced physicality and uninflected continuity of motion. The deceptive “ordinariness” of many of the individual movements in Trio had a profound impact on the development of postmodern dance.’ — MoMA

the entirety

 

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Rhode Island Red (1968)
‘Ten minutes in an enormous chicken coop. Camerawork by Roy Levin.’ — Letterboxd

 

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Line (1969)
‘A blond woman (Susan Marshall) in white pants and shirt interacts with a moving round object and the camera. Camerawork by Phill Niblock.’ — Monoskop

 

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Lives of Performers (1972)
‘Lives of Performers was made when Rainer was in her late thirties and restarting her life after a suicide attempt the previous year. On the screen, the title Lives of Performers is followed by a parenthetical, (a melodrama), and the film is centered on the troubles caused by the indecision of a man torn between two women. “Rainer is continuously searching for some invisible architecture, reasons we might move or behave in the way we do, why a thing is funny to some people, frightening to others,” writes Natasha Stagg in the Metrograph Journal. “Rainer’s feature films purposefully teeter between critique and pastiche, leveraging cliché as base to life’s acid.”’ — Criterion Collection

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Film About a Woman Who ... (1974)
‘Film About a Woman Who …, a landmark film that is still considered by many to be her masterpiece, 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.’ — FIT

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Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)
‘In Kristina Talking Pictures, Rainer resisted what she termed “narrative expectation” by making a disjointed film structured like a collage. A loose plotline runs through it, centered on a Hungarian lion tamer named Kristina, whose past is haunted by virulent anti-Semitism, and who has come to New York to become a choreographer. She falls in love with a sailor named Raoul, who leaves her, returns, and then leaves again. But Rainer frustrates any semblance of plot or character development, and nothing remains stable in this film: dialogues begin, only to be cut off; a single character may be played by multiple members of the cast; each scene is like a self-contained vignette, rather than a coherent segment of a larger whole; and Rainer couples the film’s visual austerity with an excess of dialogue and voiceovers.’ — MoMA

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Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980)
‘“Without a doubt the most ambitious, most risk-taking work of Rainer’s cinematic career.” — B. Ruby Rich. Rainer’s fourth feature, inspired by her experiences living in West Berlin in 1976 and ’77, when the activities of right-wing terrorists were at their height, offers an audacious, collage-like meditation on state power, repression, violence, and revolution. Vaulting between aerial images of British landscapes, intertitles, fragments of Rainer’s teenage diary, and one unseen couple’s debate (voiced by Amy Taubin and Vito Acconci) over the demise of the RAF, the film is illuminated by a lead performance from the late art and film critic Annette Michelson as a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, whose every gesture was choreographed elaborately by Rainer over a nine-month period.’ — Zeitgeist Films

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The Man Who Envied Women (1985)
‘Words as a means of individual expression can be a potent form of seduction. But words strung together as interchangeable syntactic cues towards a coded, contemporary social language can also transform the intrinsic materiality of words into an irrelevant – and incoherent – abstraction. The identification of this threshold between langue (language) and parole (word) lies at the heart of this thematically dense and iconoclastic, yet uncompromising, articulate, and fiercely intelligent film.’ — Strictly Film School

 

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Privilege (1990)
‘In Rainer’s film Privilege, the white-identification and Marxian/psychoanalytic dialectic of The Man Who Envied Women now gives way to questions about the relationship of gender to racism and economic class, and about the legal, scientific, and medical discourses that define, and ultimately oppress, our bodies. Some of these problems were, of course, also addressed in the earlier film, but in Privilege Rainer refuses the rhetorical indirectness and theoretical density of the previous work, spelling out these problems with uncompromising frankness and wit. She constructs a remarkably coherent pastiche, juxtaposing a fictional narrative about a menopausal heterosexual woman recounting an experience she has kept secret for 30 years with excerpts from vintage educational films on menopause and contemporary interviews with women who in real life are coping with the often painful and lonely passage into “change of life.”’ — Maurice Berger

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MURDER and murder (1996)
‘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 glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.’ — Letterboxd

 

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After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002)
‘The immediate source of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid is the 35-minute dance piece Yvonne Rainer pro-duced for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2000, in which he and five other performers appeared. Since the transition away from choreography to filmmak-ing early in her career, Rainer had always shown a recombinant streak, with her first films incorporating elements of dance and stagecraft drawn from live performance. But it’s an effectively alchemical conversion Rainer conducts in moving from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan to After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid. Its title from Tennyson by way of Aldous Huxley’s Los Angeles novel, Rainer’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan consisted of original choreographic movement as well as invocations of her own earlier work from the Judson Dance Theater period, accompanied by recitations of deathbed utterances—last gasps—from individuals both well-known and obscure, and other musical and textual elements, including three poems she’d recently written.’ — Wexner Center

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. Ginsberg basically hit on every young poet, so it’s not even a feather in my cap. I know that Bruce Boone essay. Yeah, it’s brilliant. He so regularly is, and nice that he foresaw me doing worthy things as a poet even though I ended up kind of bailing on the genre. You should come walk in Paris. It’s the ultimate walking city, should you ever ask me. I’ve been curious to read ‘Fuccboi’, but I never have. I remember its response was extremely mixed, always an intriguing sign. Flaubert’s letters must be nice. I didn’t know that about Sartre hating Flaubert, much that he wrote a whole book of Flaubert hatred. Very interesting. I’ll see if it’s gettable. Me too re: my hopes for you. I think I’m pretty much following your hope’s narrative. Thanks, man. ** Charalampos, Hi. I’m sorry to hear of your lonesomeness. Bad state, usually fades out though. I wrote ‘Closer’ between 1984-1988. I was experimenting on it long before then, but that’s when it finally gelled. So, I was in my early-mid-30s. I guess a very, very fetal version was in my mind since I was 15 because that’s when I started thinking about writing what ended up being the Cycle. I hope you get to perk way up, friend. Love’s vibes from where(ever) I am. ** Jack Skelley, Hey Skelley. Announced! It looks like we’ll both be July book birthday boys together. Everyone, The great scribe Jack Skelley has a new book forthcoming on July 2nd called ‘Myth Lab’, and I’ve read it, and it’s spectacularly great. Here’s where you can read about it and even preorder it. Highly recommended that you do so. Cool descriptive paragraph, written I assume by you? Of course, a ‘welcome’ post for your book is a no brainer. Hit me up with the stuff when the time’s right. Sabrina has a copy of ‘Fun To Be Dead’ for me, and I need to retrieve it. See you in mere days. Yours, Anyone on earth other than Joni Mitchell. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, I think my longing for Halloween has officially begun. I keep looking and looking with futility for our mouse’s entrance hole(s), and I swear to god I think he/she/they can pass through walls. Too long a story re: the producers. I think we’re talking with them today, if they don’t yet again blow us off. Well, I can offer you a Guided by Voices song that has literally been stuck in my head for five months if not even longer if you’re feeling brave. If so, here. I even named a story in my new book after it hoping it would leave me alone, but that didn’t work either. Love relocating this roller coaster from where it’s being built in Saudi Arabia to Parc Asterix, G. ** Joseph, Oh, heck, let’s just give them the Nobel Prize and get it over with. ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ has yet to pop up on my favorite illegal site, but it’s sure to any day now, and I will happily key you in once it’s ensconced there. Yikes, the cicadas’ hell on earth. I appreciate the imaginative access. I guess they must exist here? So much more workable than the hundreds of itsy bitsy flies that have suddenly decided my bathroom is Mecca. ** _Black_Acrylic, Americans aren’t what they used to be. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Will Ferrell movie, weirdly, but he was quite funny back when he was on SNL, and he obviously has fine taste in futbol teams. Congrats? ** Bill, Hey. Ooh, that Bali thing looks awfully fun, doesn’t it? I don’t think Michael has any ‘in’ with the American market but I know he’s trying to get his film some kind of life there. Surely it’ll get streamed somewhere over there. I’ll ask him what the latest is. ** Nick Toti, Hello, Nick! Congratulations on the birth! I would be happy to host its official online premiere, of course. Tell me how that can be accomplished. Or, wait, I’ll check my email. Great. ‘Room Temperature’ is finished except for a few days’ extremely minimal special effects work. It’s in submission to two festivals atm, and we’re waiting anxiously to hear if either will fly. The producer nightmare will never die, but it’s at a less horrifying stage for the moment, at least. ** Steve, Hi. Oh, no, the haunt in our film is rather wholesome relatively speaking. ‘Not Like Us’ is a catchy thing indeed. I haven’t heard ‘Euphoria’ yet. I heard one of the Drake diss tracks, and it was shit, but I think he’s kind of shit generally. ** Brightpath, Hello, Brightpath. What a friendly name you have. I’ve only seen the 2015 Hell House LLC movie, the first one, I think. I did find it quite charming. I am super extremely easy when it comes to haunted house-related anything. I’ll go watch the sequel or sequels now. Thank you very much. What’s going on with you? ** Darby🎱, I’m sure I read that Gacy book. I read all of the Gacy books back in the day when I was a wannabe serial killer scholar. Wild: your association with its author. I think sharing perogies counts. Yeah, I’ve come across obviously faked animal rescue videos, and they’re pure evil. Phone calls can drain one. I just had one of those. He’s cute alright. Awwww … à bientôt! ** GrabBag and Greeny? Why?! :/, His description is promising, of course. Well, be careful then. His description is also dangerous. Virtually in the sense of nearly, almost. Here’s an experimental filmic kiss, the best kind. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Nice, your name looks like a roller coaster. I’ll try to get and have some anise on hand in case of emergency. Me too, I have a very hard time with people who use the possible hierarchical structure inherent in a job’s build as a way to wield power. We’ve had this with the film where the people who are technically ‘in charge’ due to their title but who actually don’t do shit try to act dictatorial. Anyway, I hear you, and all hopes that the next gig you take is collaborative. That does sound like a super stressful period you’re in. Like you said, you’ll get through it, as daunting as it feels, I’m sure. Hm, about preserving your load. I suppose there’s a why not, who knows aspect, but if you’re sure you don’t want to sire someone, then why? My mom was a really terrible alcoholic for years, and I’m sure my disinterest in that liquid and my discomfort around people who are getting plastered is explainable thereby. As for London, I had the shit kicked out of me one night in the early 90s by a bunch of very drunk football lads whose team had just lost, so I do feel a little spooked there once it gets dark. ** Justin D, Hi. Coincidentally, my mouse friend just caught him/her/themself in our benign trap this very morning, and they are now accustoming themself to new lodgings a couple of blocks away. So, it’s good I didn’t name them. Okay, that’s pleasant reasoning behind the pet names. I think parental projection is a serious plague, so I’m guessing you’re right. The cover of ‘I Wished’ is by a Norwegian artist, Kier Cooke Sandvik. He also did the art supposedly made by the main character in our film ‘Permanent Green Light’. He’s great, yeah. Thank you. I hope your watch emptied that popcorn box. ** Thomas H, Hey! Oh, that book does sound intriguing, I’ll head over to Internet Archive in a bit. Thanks, bud. Be forewarned that my recommendation can do as much harm as good seeing as how there are as many people who see my name as a flashing red light as an attribution. But I’m game, yep. ** Nicholas(Nick), Really, it was the volume not the cheese. I will click in minutes from now as my instincts are peaked. Oh, gosh, I have so many go-to sites and apps, I wouldn’t know where to start. Oh, in my last ‘best of the year’ post I listed some faves there. Here. I want those cookies. There must be a way. Later gator. ** Oscar 🌀, You just made it! We are on the same page re: pubs and cinemas. I’m determined to go the cinema today. I will soon be in search of a friend who feels similarly. At least in the States, there’s a huge industry of Halloween decorations-selling businesses that pop up every October, and, needless to say, they are infinitely more pleasing to stroll within than the similar Xmas pop up ventures. May today offer you free hugs galore without the icky emotional part. ** Right. Are you familiar with the films of the great choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer? If not, welcome to your encounter with them, and, if so, welcome home, I guess. See you tomorrow.