Selection 1: Yvonne Rainer / The Man Who Envied Women

29 March, 2023 - 19:30
Minard

 

 SOLD OUT

 

 OPENING NIGHT

 For the opening night a presale ticket is required, for Friends of Courtisane, guests and accredited a reservation is required.

 

Coming soon: all seven recently restored films by Yvonne Rainer – Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who... (1974), Talking Pictures (1976), Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996) – will be presented in collaboration with CINEMATEK and Cinea.

Special thanks to Zeitgeist Films & Kino Lorber

The Man Who Envied Women

Yvonne Rainer
,
US
,
1985
,
16mm to digital
,
125'

Around a familiar theme – the breakup of a marriage – Yvonne Rainer constructs a wickedly funny account of a self-satisfied womaniser. Sitting in a chair facing the camera, Jack Deller (played alternately by two actors) rambles on about women, whose visual absence runs through the entire film. On the soundtrack we hear their questions and comments, by turns enraged or laconic, both stressing and also subverting Deller’s self-assured discourse. The spoken words are taken from texts found in film and everyday culture, from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and feminist theory. Aside from the theme of the failed (heterosexual) relationship, further fields of conflict get explored – the housing shortage and gentrification in New York during the 1980s, abortion rights, the violent interventions of the US in Latin America. A never-ending collage made up of contradictory levels of meaning results in producing ever new connections and contexts. Barbara Kruger wrote in Artforum in 1986: “Rainer is not trying for some kind of well-mannered correctness or a masterly, fatherly notion of ‘transcendent intellectual clarity’; rather, she tends toward a type of tumbling process, an unbalancing of power, language, and the body.” (Berlinale Forum Expanded)

 

English spoken