Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"To read Rainer's screenplays is to rediscover, even reinvent, the films all over again, but more importantly to realize that images and mise-en-scène are as key to how Rainer's films work as is language." --The Independent
"The scripts record the unique structure of [Rainer's] films, the stresses, strains, and crackling of voices layering over and into one another. Their publication is an important moment for feminist film." --Cineaste
"Rainer's films are not highly accessible but are important to the critical imagination as an example of the sustained exploration of political and feminist theory." --Choice
"Rainer's important work in the area of avant-garde filmmaking in the seventies and eighties is amply recorded in this book . . . " --Cantrills Filmnotes'
The scripts of Rainer's five films, presented here along with essays, an interview, and bibliography, demonstrate the evolution of her political consciousness as well as her creative engagement with the contemporary film and cultural scene. These texts challenge the illusionist and ideological presumptions of mainstream culture and cinema.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword
• Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction
• Impossible Projections
• Interview with Yvonne Rainer
• Illustrations
• Film Scripts
• Lives of Performers
• Film About a Woman Who...
• Kristina Talking Pictures
• Journeys from Berlin/1971
• The Man Who Envied Women
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• compliled by Patricia White

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Yvonne Rainer began as an established modern dancer/performer and, at the beginning of the 1980s, turned to film. She has now gained a reputation as an innovative avant-garde filmmaker and is known as a key force in the reinvention of narrative in film. This volume is really an appreciation of Rainer, with a reprint of an essay about her by Ruby Rich, an extended interview with Rainer, an analysis of her style by French critic Berenice Reynaud, and what is perhaps the first printing of four of Rainer's most important film scripts. Although this is probably the last word on Yvonne Rainer, it really is a book designed for those that take a certain kind of approach to film and for those that are interested in feminist sexuality in postmodernist art. Rainer's films are not highly accessible but are important to the critical imagination as an example of the sustained exploration of political and feminist theory. Recommended for graduate film students only. J. L. Cohen Los Angeles County Museum of Art