Lives of Performers

Director: Yvonne Rainer

1972 / 90min / DCP

Rainer’s debut feature film announced both her shift from the world of dance towards avant-garde cinema, and what would become a career-long interest in “women’s stories” and the teasing machinations of melodrama. The familiar tale of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes everyone suffer is reworked by Rainer as a jolting and radically austere, anti-illusionist spectacle, comprising dance rehearsals, photography, tableaux, and a flurry of fragments of text, both onscreen and not. Off-camera, multiple voices can be heard—including that of cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who was at the time just beginning work with a young Chantal Akerman.