A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The activities revealed in "Louise's Story Told in Thirteen Shots" are the polar opposite of the activities that would be the focus of any conventional narrative film. Each shot focuses on a dimension of Louise's life that would be, at most, the background for erotic (and/or violent) adventures in a commercial movie. The film doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of the erotic from Louise's life (her relationship with Maxine may be an erotic one, though we never see any direct evidence of erotic engagement between the two women), but at no point is the erotic the "hook" for viewer interest. The pleasures of this cinematic text are formal and intellectual: the brilliant and often exhilarating 360-degree pans that define a new kind of cinematic space and an entirely original narrative structure; the densely suggestive mise-en-scene, which in every instance elaborates the implications of Louise's story; and the intricate mirror structureitself a reference to the "mirror" phase of childhood developmentthat informs the sections that frame "Louise's Story.'' For Mulvey and Wollen, the antidote to the conventional cinema's, depiction of women's bodies and its narrow sense of women's lives is not shock, not a reductio ad absurdum of its tendency to fetishize particular sectors of the body as in

Near the Big Chakra,

but a thoroughly imaginative and accomplished alternative to traditional cinematic narrative, and perhaps, a catalyst for a new, progressively feminist genre.

Privilege

(1990) is Yvonne Rainer's most recent addition to a filmmaking career of twenty years that has produced six feature films, a career that itself followed an influential career in dance/choreography/performance that began in the early sixties (see Rainer's

Work 196173

[New York and Halifax: New York University Press and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974]). Throughout her feature filmmaking, Rainer has attempted to respond to her audience's interest in melodrama without relying on the forms of cinematic pleasure that characterize industry films

and,

in the years since

Film About a Woman Who

 . . . (1974), without relying either on the pleasures of sensuous image-making or of formal designthe mainstays of much of the independent cinema that critiques

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conventional moviemaking. Rainer has become identified with a filmmaking approach that provides narrative development by means of a variety of anti-illusionistic means: most obviously, she develops characters who enact scenes that are inevitably revealed as fabrications as they are presented: usually we see the scene and the filming of it, simultaneously; and she uses a variety of forms of printed or spoken textsome of it written by Rainer, much of it borrowed from other sourcesthat elaborate a weave of narrative actions that are "shot" in the mind of the viewer.

Privilege

uses Rainer's approach in order to explore the issues of menopause and racism.

The very idea of centering a feature film on menopause, which, as Rainer makes clear in

Privilege,

has been culturally defined as

un

pleasurethe tail end of youth and eroticism, the epitome of the uncinematicis an explicit critique of the conventional cinema and its limited view of women. The fact that

Privilege

is an enjoyable film, fascinating even to rather conventional audiences (at least in my experience as an exhibitor), makes it a breakthrough, the ultimate cinematic magic trick, and a potential catalyst for the liberation of women and men from conventional definitions that have tended to constrict our lives in the most obvious ways.

The central narrative thread of

Privilege