Projection and discussion
TypoFilm #8 : Yvonne Rainer
Film About a Woman Who...
05 Oct 2022
The event is over
Made in 1974 and based on a multimedia theatre performance, Film About a Woman Who… is American choreographer, dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer’s second feature film.
A deconstructed and self-reflexive stylised soap opera, the film, in the filmmaker’s own words, is “the poetically licenced story of a women who encounters difficulties reconciling certain external facts with the image she has of her own perfection. It is also the story of the same women if we claim that she cannot reconcile these facts with the image of her own deformity”. Openly opposing the narrative mechanisms of identification, Rainer uses the text on the screen - both that of the intertitles and within the shot - to halt, suspend or divert the narrative.
Yvonne Rainer, Film About a Woman Who…, 1974, 16 mm, black and white and colour, sound [original English version with French subtitles], 105 minutes
With: Dempster Leech, Shirley Soffer, John Erdman, Renfreu Neff, James Barth, Epp Kotkas, Sarah Soffer, Yvonne Rainer, Tannis Hugill, Valda Setterfield
Photography: Babette Mangolte
The film presented is a copy restored by The Museum of Modern Art in New York with the support of the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.
Acknowledgments: Katie Trainor, Theo Harrison (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The “TypoFilm” project receives exceptional support from the French government, managed by the French National Research Agency as part of the Investments for the Future programme, ref. ANR-17-EURE-0008.
Session presented by Johanna Renard, Art Historian and faculty member at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Valence, author of Un ennui radical. Yvonne Rainer, danse et cinéma (de l’incidence éditeur, 2022).
When
7pm - 9pm
Where
Yvonne Rainer, Film About a Woman Who..., 1974
© Yvonne Rainer
© Centre Pompidou