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Kristina Talking Pictures (1976, 90 min) by Yvonne Rainer. Screening. With an introduction by Nóra Lukács, curator of the exhibition If the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag. Art and Internationalism before the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Image gallery
Filmrolle
Yvonne Rainer (*1934 in San Francisco) is a dancer, choreographer,
and filmmaker and one of the most influential representatives of
postmodern dance.
She studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in
late-1950s New York and began choreographing her own works shortly
after that. In 1962, Rainer co-founded the Judson Dance Theater
collective with Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Meredith Monk, and others.
Their inaugural performance occurred on July 6, 1962, at Judson
Memorial Church in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, marking the birth of
postmodern dance.
From 1966 onward, Rainer began to infuse
her dance choreographies with elements like slides, film sequences, and
textual fragments. Later, dance and performance became a central focus
of her experimental films. In 1972, she produced her first
feature-length film, Lives of Performers, seen as an extension of
her mixed-media performances.
Rainer’s early films subverted
conventional directorial norms and bear a distinctive feminist and
political signature, with autobiography and fiction intertwining to
examine themes such as the female body and its objectification,
relationship dynamics, political radicalism, and female sexuality.
In
late 1976, Rainer came to West Berlin as a guest under the DAAD
Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in the film section. That September, she
featured in the exhibition SoHo – Downtown Manhattan during the
Berliner Festwochen at Akademie der Künste (West). In May 1977, Kino
Arsenal, in collaboration with the BKP, screened her first three feature
films, including Kristina Talking Pictures (1976, 90 min). The artist describes it as follows:
“[It]
is a narrative film inasmuch as it contains a series of events that can
be synthesized into a story if one is disposed to do so. (A European
woman line-tamer comes to America and takes up choreography) The film
can also be characterized by its discursions from a strict narrative
line via reflections on art, love, and catastrophe sustained by the
voices of Kristina, the heroine-narrator, and Raoul, her lover. Within
its form of shifting correlations between word and image, persona and
performer, enactment and illustration, explanation and ambiguity, Kristina Talking Pictures circles in a narrowing spiral toward its primary concerns: the
uncertain relation of public act to personal fate, the ever-present
possibility for disparity between public-directed conscience and private
will.”
Kristina Talking Pictures will be screened at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) as part of the collaborative project If the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag.
This exhibition delves into the artistic scenes in West Berlin before
the fall of the Berlin Wall, based on the history of the DAAD
Artists-in-Berlin Program and examines its role in nurturing artistic
practices and networks during the Cold War.
Free admission
Participating artists
Yvonne Rainer
