The Man Who Envied Women (Rainer, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This film is part of the Yvonne Rainer retrospective at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
It’s strange to recall that as a modern dancer and choreographer, Yvonne
Rainer was known throughout the 60s and early 70s as a minimalist. For
the past 15 years, she has been making experimental quasi-narrative
films of an increasing multitextual density, culminating in this angry,
vibrant film of 1985, which, in her own words, takes on “the housing
shortage, changing family patterns, the poor pitted against the middle
class, Hispanics against Jews, artists and politics, female menopause,
abortion rights. There’s even a dream sequence.” Working with the speech
and writing of over a dozen figures, ranging from Raymond Chandler to
Julia Kristeva, Rainer also confronts and parodies male theoretical
discourse (Michel Foucault in particular, sampled and discussed in
extended chunks) as a mode of sexual seduction. Politics have been
present in all her features, but usually folded into so many distancing
devices that they mainly come out dressed in quotes. Here she allows the
politics to speak more directly and eloquently, and it charges the rest
of the film like a live wire–rightly assuming that we could all use a
few jolts.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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