A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

extremely accessible. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and when I screened it as part of my film series in Utica I discovered it was accessible to a relatively general audience.

Rainer:

This is a mainstream-geared audience?

MacDonald:

Pretty much. My series has a reputation, so the audience usually expects something unusual, but they're certainly not shy about leaving. At

Privilege,

I don't believe more than five people left, out of seventy-five or eighty. I've always assumed that your refusal to provide certain kinds of conventional pleasure was a defiance of what the audience has come to expect. But this film includes the audience in a new way.

Rainer:

In Australia, someone asked meafter screening

Privilege

"Why are you so committed to depriving the audience of pleasure?"

MacDonald:

They said that after

Privilege

?

Rainer:

After

Privilege

.

MacDonald:

That surprises me.

Rainer:

I was astounded because I have never thought of myself as depriving anyone of pleasure, unless a shot or a sequence had a specific political agenda, like the tracking shot into the nude in

Film About a Woman Who

. . . . There was a specific mission there. It was an arduous experience for the audience to stay with that shot:

no

one could derive pleasure from

that

image of the woman's body. But in the general course of things,

I

always thought I was introducing

new

pleasuresthe pleasure of the text, of reading.

MacDonald:

It's true; there are pleasures in many of the stories told in your films but not much

visual

pleasure, especially in the films after

Film About a Woman Who

 . . . : that film and

Lives of Performers

[1972] have an unpretentious elegance and sensuality that's lacking in later films, especially from

Journeys from Berlin/1971

[1980] and

The Man Who Envied Women

. So when

Privilege

struck me as thoroughly pleasurable, I thought that since, as Jenny says at the beginning of the film, the subject

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of menopause has come to

mean

unpleasure, you felt free to bring back other obvious kinds of cinematic pleasure as a defiance of the conventional attitude about menopause (and its implications for women), and as a way of modeling a new attitude about menopause (and about film).

Rainer:

That may be a way of reading the progression of my films, but it was certainly not uppermost in my mind.

What

has

been on my mind is an ongoing relationship to narrative, be it about pleasure or nonpleasure. If narrative is a way of

engaging

the audience, I've gone further and further toward narrative conventions, such as

plot:

this is the first of my films that has a semblance of a plot; it's the first film to use so many professional actors. This is the first film that does not have some overly long passage that people just can't stay withthe theoretical lecture in

The Man Who Envied Women,

or the anecdotal, voice-over material in

Journeys From Berlin

. I have always thought of my films as containing dry moments, but compensating for those with offsetting momentswith animals or stories or irony, humor.

MacDonald:

This is also the first film where you use extensive interviewing, isn't it?

Rainer:

Well, there's the housing hearing in

The Man Who Envied Women,

but I didn't interview those people. It's talking heads, people giving testimony.

MacDonald:

Women talking about their menopausal experiences is, actually, fascinating. Ironically, since it has been a taboo subject in movies, it has become as interesting as other taboo subjects that have to do with the body. The audienceat least the audience I saw the film withseemed excited to hear these revelations.

Rainer:

These are all young people?

MacDonald:

About half of them were college people; half were older people from the community.

Rainer:

I often get the question from men, Who's your audience? At one point I was saying, "It's young women and men, because young women don't

want

to know about menopause, and men have no reason to, have nothing at stake."

MacDonald:

Unless a man is deeply involved with someone struggling with menopause.

Near the end, the Yvonne Washington character says,

I try to monitor when my hot flashes occur. I'm watching a video cassette of "Sweet Sweetback's Baadaass Song." "Why does an embodiment of black protest have to be a stud?" flashes through my mind, and along comes a hot flash. I'm on the subway thinking about a friend. ''Forget that family crap," I think.

Flash

 . . . Ready to leave, I put on my coat in an overheated room.

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