Artists' Television Access

Yvonne Rainer’s JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971

Thursday, March 29, 2007, 8:00 pm, $6

Yvonne Rainer - Journeys
Cynthia Beatt in Berlin

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Following our sold-out screening of Debord’s totalizing critique of culture, we present Rainer’s fourth film, and some say her finest, an essay on radicalism and rehabilitation.

How are oppositional politics advanced by their partisans and neutralised by the State? Radicals are those who expose hidden repressive tendencies in a society. Their tactics are criminalized, politics psychologized and reforms bureacratized. 

Rainer’s film questions duplicitous rehabilitation (psychiatric care/control), the efficacy of radicalism, and conflicted political and personal motivations.

The collage essay technique of Journeys parallels the investigation of these conflicts on a formal level. She weaves the stories of 19th century Russian anarchists; the staging of identity as it occurs in therapeutic analysis, writing a diary or preparing a meal; and the fate of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), which exposed the precarious and enforced nature of West German democratic freedoms in the 1970s.

Featuring Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Vito Acconci, Cynthia Beatt, Ilona Halberstadt, Vernon Gabor, Yvonne Rainer and many others.

please note that two Judson choreographers are represented on this month’s ATA Calendar

July 1961 —Freddie Herko and Yvonne Rainer make their debuts as choreographers at a group dance concert organized by James Waring. (from Warhol Factory pre-history page).  The first Judson Dance Theater concert took place on July 6, 1962, and dances were presented by Steve Paxton, Fred Herko, David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson.


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