Yvonne Rainer

“Championed by Annette Michelson, B. Ruby Rich, and many others, [Yvonne] Rainer’s films are densely verbose, elusive, dryly comic, furious, fractured, and intimately concerned with addressing a variety of injustices beyond the concerns of feminism, from ageism to gentrification to mental illness,” writes Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca in her July/August print feature “Moving Beyond.” “Each work turns received notions of form and feminist praxis on their heads, talking out solutions to (or just expressing frustration at) extremely large problems, and using anecdotes to illustrate how desire and power influence all aspects of our lives.” On the occasion of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of her films, Rainer, 82, joined Lucca for a conversation ranging across her varied and dynamic career—her choreography and radical dance work, her cinema’s aesthetic approaches to examining privilege, and her interactions with second- and third-wave feminist circles.