Counter Feminist Narration
Yvonne Rainer / Jacques Kebadian

Wednesday March 12, 2008 - 8pm
Cinema Le Méliès - Montreuil

 Meeting in the presence of Jacques Kebadian and Johanna Renard (specialist of the Yvonne Rainer cinema).

Albertine, le souvenir parfumé de Marie Rose
by Jacques Kebadian and the Eugène Varlin Collective
(1972, 25 min)

Comedy insolente and antiautoritaire, “Albertine”, film-proclamation of the insurrection of youth and the desires, tell the history of a teenager in rebellion against the school, the rancid family, the religion and put in scene young girls and young boys from 14 to 18 years which assert their right to a sexuality without obstacles and the right to the abortion for the minor ones. (Text: AI&KQ)
Comedy insolente and antiautoritaire, “Albertine”, film-proclamation of the insurrection of youth and the desires, tell the history of a teenager in rebellion against the school, the rancid family, the religion and put in scene young girls and young boys from 14 to 18 years which assert their right to a sexuality without obstacles and the right to the abortion for the minor ones. (Text: AI&KQ)(distribution: le peuple qui manque)

Film about a woman who…  by Yvonne Rainer
(1974, 105min)

Decisive and extremely rare film of the American avant-garde, magnificiently photographed by Babette Mangolte, Film butt has woman who… of the choreographer Yvonne Rainer, tells, in a fragmentary way and by the means of intimate conversations, the love affairs between men and women, anticipating magistralement the feminist text pioneer of Laura Mulvey, Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema, published in 1975, analyzes critical narrative film, and particularly of the Hollywood American cinema, in his construction of an iconography and a filmic language sexists. Film butt has woman who concerns thus a project of against-narration which aims at countering the identification, while being made place of expression of a subjective experiment and a feminist conscience. “I felt authorized - at the moment when I started to interest me in the question of the narration and the account - to explore my own life as a material-source for my work, to pay an attention increased to my own experiences, just like myself as a historical subject. ” (Text: AI&KQ)

Yvonne Rainer studied the dance in New York with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham before founding with others the group Avant-garde Dance, in Judson Dance Theater, in 1962, which became the center of the experimental contemporary dance new yorkaise. In 1965, Yvonne Rainer published a proclamation which made school, inviting the artists to reject the spectacle, the virtuosity and all the other types of artifices of the dance, for a revolutionary esthetics stripping superfluity. With the beginning of the year 1970, Yvonne Rainer joins again with the narrative screen and gives a political dimension to its work. It gives up the world of the dance in 1974 to be devoted to the cinematographic realization, in order to work with a tool more permanent than the movement. Abandonment also dependent on its progressive engagement in feminism. Nevertheless, the experimentation, the parcelling out, the unusual juxtaposition and a demarcation or an eloquent rupture with the aesthetic postulates, are elements that Rainer transposed of the dance to the screen in works like Lives off Performers (1972), Film butt has Woman Who… (1974), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1991) and Murder and Murder (1996).