Film: The Front Line 1983 - Softcover

Rosenbaum, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0912869038 ISBN 13: 9780912869032

Publisher: Arden Pr, 1983

Synopsis

The Film : The Front Line volumes treat approximately 20 filmmakers who are changing the shape of the movies shown in our neighborhood theaters, though their work will likely never be seen there. Jonathan Rosenbaum makes accessible the work of such neglected experimental and personal filmmakers as Chantal Akerman, Jon Jost, Ulrike Ottinger, Yvonne Rainer, and Mark Rappaport. These and others included here have been treated before only in media that are not readily available to the student of film, and yet they form an important part of film's front line.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a contributor to Cahiers Du Cinema, Sight & Sound, and Omni and is the author of Moving Places : A Life At The Movies. He is also co-author with J. Hoberman of Midnight Movies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Yvonne Rainer.

Born in San Francisco, 1934.
1967--Volleyball (Foot Film) (16mm, b&w, 10 min., silent)
1968--Hand Movie (8mm, b&w, 5 min., silent)
Rhode Island Red (16mm, b&w, 10 min., silent)
Trio Film (16mm, b&w, 13 min., silent)
1969--Line (16mm, b&w, 10 min., silent)
1972--Lives of Performers (16mm, b&w, 95 min.)
1974--Film about a Woman Who...(16mm, b&w & color, 105 min.)
1976--Kristina Talking Pictures (16mm, b&w & color, 90 min.)
1980--Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971 (16mm, b&w & color, 125 min.)

The first (and, to my mind, best) two features by Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers and Film About a Woman Who..., are the masterful films of a dancer, performance artist, choreographer, and writer who has turned to filmmaking as a means of extending her work, continuing many of its parameters through other means. The second two features, Kristina Talking Pictures and Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971, as their lumpier titles suggest, are a lot less singular in their frames and impacts, and inevitably split off into dissociated sections--many of them as brilliant and resonant with meaning as anything Rainer has done. They are not projects that want to limit themselves to single genres to the degree that the preceding films do, organized as they are around the modes of soap opera, melodrama, and performance itself. These later films, which seem to want to relocate performance art in other venues--the circus, politics, psychoanalysis--are more like Bouvard and Pecuchet enterprises: one is served up an indigestible surfeit of texts in many forms, some of them overlapping, as in middle-period Godard or Hock's Pacific Time or Ottinger's Freak Orlando (to cite three widely divergent examples)--creating a blankness of effect at certain junctures of particular overload, oddly resembling the minimalism of Peter Gidal, who, in his spareness, starts from the opposite extreme. The main point of similarity, it seems to me, is the puritanism of both filmmakers, each obsessed with the dialectics of exposure and concealment in relation to their films and polemical positions. Gidal's dual focus on, say, the exposure of Warhol's cinema and the concealment of Beckett's prose (as connected through the political example of Brecht) can thus be seen as the near-equivalent of Rainer's equal interest in obscenity and censorship (as mediated through the apolitical influence of psychoanalysis) in all four of her features...."

Edition details

• Publisher: Arden Pr
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0912869038
• ISBN 13: 9780912869032
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238