Journeys From Berlin

Director: Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer

1980 / 125min / DCP

Rainer’s fourth feature, inspired by her experiences living in West Berlin in 1976 and ’77, when the activities of right-wing terrorists were at their height, offers an audacious, collage-like meditation on state power, repression, violence, and revolution. Vaulting between aerial images of British landscapes, intertitles, fragments of Rainer’s teenage diary, and one unseen couple’s debate (voiced by Amy Taubin and Vito Acconci) over the demise of the RAF, the film is illuminated by a lead performance from the late art and film critic Annette Michelson as a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, whose every gesture was choreographed elaborately by Rainer over a nine-month period. “Without a doubt the most ambitious, most risk-taking work of Rainer’s cinematic career.”—B. Ruby Rich