A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Were you already at work on this project at that point?

Rainer:

Yes. But the Yvonne Washington/Jenny face-off hadn't been written.

MacDonald:

How much response to the film by African-Americans have you seen? In Utica the audience was about twenty percent African-American. It was pretty much the same audience that had, earlier in the fall, seen

Sidewalk Stories

[1990]. At that earlier screening, I was shocked to realize that some young African-Americans in the audience had a hard time watching the couple in

Sidewalk Stories

kiss, apparently because they weren't young and attractive enough for the movies. So I wondered how middle-aged women discussing menopause would affect a similar student clientele. As it turned out, there seemed to be an appreciation for the kinds of African-American women who show up in the film and the way in which they're presented, and present themselves.

Rainer:

I've had very little response from nonwhites so far. I took the film to the Frederick Douglass Institute of African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. I expected at least a fifty-fifty balance of races in the audience, but it was an almost totally white crowd. Karen Fields, who is the head of that institute, was very appreciative of the film. In fact, I remember she said, "How did you come to deal with something as explosive as a black on white rape, with such restraint?"

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When I go out with the film, it's pretty much white audiences. After this year is over, when I stop taking care of my official bookings, I'm going to do an outreach and try to bring the film to community groups. I have to find the black audience. The discussions have been really interesting, and there's no reason they wouldn't be equally interesting with black audiences.

MacDonald:

You mentioned to Lynn Tillman in the

Voice

interview ["A Woman Called Yvonne," Jan. 15, 1991, p. 56] that Novella Nelson had an input into the film . . .

Rainer:

I was giving Lynn an example of why the opening title credit says

Privilege,

a film by Yvonne Rainer

and many others

. I've never submitted a film to so many people or asked for so much criticism. So there was a contribution there. In rehearsal, Novella corrected my vernacular. She substituted "dude" for "guy"things like that. And there were a couple of key moments like the one I mentioned to Lynn: Novella's response to Eldridge Cleaver, for example. She was very involved and made comments along the way.

MacDonald:

At one point late in the film, there's a tussle where Jenny and Yvonne Washington laugh and wrestle about being in front of the camera. Jenny feels she's been on the hot seat long enough and that it's Yvonne's turn. Yvonne Washington ends up being in front of the camera and talking about her menopause. This raises the issue of the filmmaker exposing herself to the eye of the camera to the degree her interviewees are exposed. You are in front of the camera in the Helen Caldicott reading, but you're not identified. You never do talk openly about

your

menopause. There seems an implicit irony here.

Rainer:

Well, the film is very artificial. It continually plays with the so-called "truth value" of documentary, and with the authenticity of identity. I'm split across any number of people in this film. You might say the whole film goes on in my own head. Anyone who knows anything about my life will recognize little bits and pieces here and there. But it's not a roman à clef, where you figure out, Oh that's this one, and that's that one. It's just a way of using material that has an authentic ring to it. Jenny's menopausal story comes from a particular source, but not from me. And it parallels the story of the Cuban woman at the end who is a real interviewee. My menopausal story is there, here and there, but it's not identified. Is this an issue for you?

MacDonald:

Well, only on the level that the real filmmaker isn't revealed as clearly as the "filmmaker" in the film.

Rainer:

I play Helen Caldicott because it was convenient, and I enjoy making these Hitchcock-like appearances. I also pop up later, making the comment about Brenda not being desired by men.

There

is

an irony in my flu-ravished face. I'm sick every time I shoot a

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film. Here, I pop up with this smeared lipstick and drawn, pallid face and talk about desirability to men! The same kind of irony comes with putting "My Funny Valentine" over my middle-aged face. Of course, it prefigures what is going to be discussed at much greater length in the film. When Novella came in, she actually thought she was going to be handling the camera and be filmed as she was shooting. I wasn't about to go that far in developing her as a literal alter ego. It suffices for me to say in the credits that she is the filmmaker, and to have said she's making a documentary film. You either take it or leave it.