Yvonne Rainer

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.

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 became known as performance art, and changed the basic tenets of experimental filmmaking - all during a time when women were largely ignored in the art world. Today she continues to push forward, creating vibrant, courageous, unpredictable work, inspiring a new generation of artists to question, overthrow, and generate possibilities of their own. Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer is the story of this remarkable artist and the equally remarkable times that shaped her creative practice.

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 do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.

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’s film.

"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 things that were foremost in my mind as I worked on the tape. What I hope will emerge from this process is an interrogative portrait of an artist for whom I have great respect and affection." --Charles Atlas

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, economic elitism, and racism. Yvonne Rainer conveys texture through the intercutting of archival footage, video, and film - as well as compositional layering through the film-within-a-film structure, elliptical (and self-referential) fusion of past and present, and the filmmaker's idiosyncratic penchant for superimposed typed text.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.

Reel 10 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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 Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.