A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Instantly I am so hot, I must tear it off . . . Reading about the Supreme Court's latest setback to civil rights. One of the justices is quoted as saying: "The fact that low-paying, unskilled jobs are overwhelmingly held by blacks is no proof of racism."

Flash

 . . . Thinking about what I could have said, should have said:

Flash

 . . . [quoted from Rainer's screenplay]

The implication seems to be that you question whether at least some of the symptoms of menopause have anything to do with the physical changes occurring.

Rainer:

That was physiological license; it was a way of bringing together the body and the external, social issues: race, especially.

MacDonald:

I ask because during a particularly stressful period of my relationship with Pat [O'Connor, MacDonald's wife], she felt her hot flashes were pretty closely related to the psychic stress caused by outside circumstances.

Rainer:

I've heard of only one corroboration of this. It certainly isn't my experience, but it sounds plausible. In

Privilege

it was a way of bringing together everything in the film, a kind of unresolved conclusion.

There are other wild goose chases: Jenny's remark that postmenopausal women don't have REM sleep, for instance. It doesn't seem to be many older people's experience that they don't dream anymore.

MacDonald:

How did you find your way to the people you interviewed?

Rainer:

A number of them were old friends. Two of the women in California I've known since I was a teenager. Once I found one person, I found another.

MacDonald:

Were there people interviewed that you didn't use?

Rainer:

Yes. And the original interviews are much, much longer. When I first started, I thought, "My god, this film's going to be ten hours long!" Then as I got the other parts of the film together, particular segments of the interviews began to pop out and be relevant.

MacDonald:

Have African-Americans or Puerto Ricans played any role in your earlier films? I don't remember any.

Rainer:

Yes. Roles, but not as ethnic-Americans. Blondell Cummings was in

Kristina Talking Pictures

[1976]. David Diao, who's Chinese-American, is also in that film. I was interested in an "interesting"-looking bunch of people. But I had no idea of dealing with racial or ethnic social difference.

MacDonald:

Was there a particular set of circumstances that led you to deal with race in

Privilege

?

Rainer:

No single circumstance. It was a gradual awareness of, one, the limitations of feminist film theory, as it has circulated around Lacanian, neo-Freudian theory; and, two, this incident in my own past that constitutes the flashback in the film, which had been troubling to

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me. In the back of my mind, I always knew that I'd have to deal with it at some point. The so-called postcolonialist cultural writing of the last five years or so moved me toward thinking about a film around that incident.

MacDonald:

So Jenny's story is pretty close to yours?

Rainer:

Jenny's

flashback,

yes.

MacDonald:

What in particular was it about the incident that made it stay with you so long?

Rainer:

It had to do with a sense that in coming to New York I had been very oblivious to many things around me. Even though I had come from an anarchist background, when it came to self-development and realizing my own potential in the world, certain things got excluded: social inequities took a back seat, in terms of consciousness. Some of that had to do with my being in psychotherapy and coming out from under an oppressive marriage and having the chance to produce a lot of work. This incident occurred at the very beginning of this psychic and social advancement, and at first it had no effect on me. It was just something that happened and was very quickly forgotten. But twenty years later, it came back to haunt me with a lot of questions about the kind of life I led then.

MacDonald:

One standard thing to say about you, and maybe it's something that you've said about yourself, is that you relentlessly avoid the personal, the autobiographical, and yet looking back now, it strikes me that your films reveal more about you than many of the films of the sixties that are

called

personal actually reveal about their makers. It's because you deal with what you're

thinking about

at any given time, which is always a large part of "who we are."

Rainer:

Yes.

MacDonald:

But I wonder, did you set out at the beginning with the idea of

not

making personal film?

Rainer: