At the Filmoteca de Catalunya

Yvonne Rainer (San Francisco, 1934) has built a career spanning more than five decades in dance, film and theoretical writing. Rainer’s early career dates back to her role as a dancer and choreographer for the modern dance collective Judson Dance Theater, where she incorporated experimental film pieces into her performances. In this first stage she wrote the text No Manifesto (1965), where she laid the foundations of her theory about the image, saying: “Not in the spectacle (…) Not in the glamour and transcendence of the images of the stars” (1965). In this retrospective we will show seven of Yvonne Rainer’s recently restored films. We want to dive deeply into the film work of an author who places at the centre of her work the desire to break with pre-existing filmic conventions and the invention of a cinematographic language more conducive to the execution of her discourse. Her first feature film, Lives of performers (1972), opens the way to her principal enquiries: the subversion of narrative discourse, the rupture with the model of identification with the characters and the continuous flow of events. As she herself explains in La narrativa al mal servicio de la identidad (1991), she is interested in films “in which in each scene we will have to decide anew the priorities of looking and listening”. Over the next three decades, she would deepen these quests in six more feature films exploring political and social issues such as imperialism, identity, romantic love, privilege and ageing.

Filmoteca de Catalunya Salvador Seguí square, 1-9. Barcelona Metro L2, L3 Bus 21 / 59 / 88 / 91 / D20 / D50 / H14 / V11 / V13