A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

No. I certainly wasn't making "personal film" in the sense Brakhage does, in the way the New American Cinemists didin terms of personal vision. I had no particular vision. And filmmakers complained about my films at the beginning because they weren't "visual"; they didn't play on the retina. My films weren't about making poetic or beautiful images. I got images where I could. And I didn't even do my own shooting! I didn't have a personal touch, in the sense of the painter's hand or a filmmaker's eyealthough an eye was certainly there, in the way shots were framed. But my imagery was always at the service of a theatrical, emotional realm;

melodrama

was the perfect form for what I was after: the emotional life lived at an extreme of desperation and conflict. I wanted to explore the emotion of personal life, but it was equally important to me that the films be fictionalized in

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some way and that there would be no central person you identified with. There's always a lot of personal material in my films, but it's diffused, decentralized, contravened by antinarrative techniques.

MacDonald:

There's a healthy recognition that even if something is personal to oneself that one's personality shares concerns, ideas, feelings, whatever with lots of other people.

Rainer:

Right.

MacDonald:

Your characteristic way of putting texts others have written into the mouths of your characters certainly diffusesor makes more complexour sense of their identity,

and

it provides the viewer with a précis of issues that you and many other people have been thinking about over a period of time. Did that technique come out of your performance work?

Rainer:

It may be related to the separation of persona and speech in some of my early dances. A person would recite a story by someone else in the first person, but their body would not be expressing that story; the body would be involved in some other continuity. I was always working for disparities between sound and image. So yes, that carried over into the films. Also, quotation is an expedient way to produce characters: I don't have to worry about psychological credibility. And it gets certain texts out:

someone

has to speak these texts that I'm interested in. It's always a question in my films who's going to speak what, especially where the characters don't have a direct connection to what or the way in which they speak. In

Privilege

Carlos speaks a text that does reflect on his life, but a text that because of his class and education, he wouldn't normally speak. I've always used my actors as mouthpieces. It's a way of talking about the spoken and the speaker at the same time, and to alternate between them: when Carlos is speaking about color, sitting on the stoop, all of a sudden he says, "Hola! Brenda! Qué tal!" as she passes by, and there's a naturalistic scene where we see him as a street person making advances to his neighbor. It's not "realistic," but it can certainly be followed by the spectator. Everyone has that potential to "speak" themselves in some kind of detached way, and also to enact themselves.

MacDonald:

I think it's only

semi

-unrealistic because we're always mouthing ideas that we get from other people . . .

Rainer:

Yes, absolutely.

MacDonald:

But mostly we disguise, or try to disguise, that we're doing it.

Rainer:

Right. Right. It happens daily. You're impressed with something someone has said or that you've read and you incorporate it into your next conversation.

MacDonald:

I remember reading about a show at the Collective that

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you and Bérénice Reynaud curated ["Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation," the Collective for Living Cinema, April 25May 8, 1988 (the program and related papers were published as the Summer/Autumn 1990 issue of

Motion Picture

)]. It was controversial.

Rainer:

Because it covered feminist films and British black films and African films. It swept with a really wide brush. We were taken to task for that.

MacDonald:

Who took you to task?

Rainer:

Coco Fusco, in

Screen

and in

Afterimage

.

MacDonald:

What was her take on the show?

Rainer:

Well, the name of her piece was "Fantasies of Oppositionality" [

Afterimage,

vol. 16, no. 5 (December 1988), and

Screen,

vol. 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988)]. The tack she took was that white experimental filmmakers and psychoanalytic feminists are trying to make a bridge between themselves and black filmmakers or blacks in general, in terms of marginalization, and that by not examining our own "otherness"in the panel discussionswe "re-centered" our whiteness. It was a hard lesson, though I still feel Coco's overkill approach was not entirely justified.

MacDonald:

In

Privilege,

the Yvonne Washington character makes that argument.

Rainer:

Yes, she's taken up a version of that criticism.

MacDonald: