A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

and,

in the years since

Film About a Woman Who

 . . . (1974), without relying either on the pleasures of sensuous image-making or of formal designthe mainstays of much of the independent cinema that critiques

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conventional moviemaking. Rainer has become identified with a filmmaking approach that provides narrative development by means of a variety of anti-illusionistic means: most obviously, she develops characters who enact scenes that are inevitably revealed as fabrications as they are presented: usually we see the scene and the filming of it, simultaneously; and she uses a variety of forms of printed or spoken textsome of it written by Rainer, much of it borrowed from other sourcesthat elaborate a weave of narrative actions that are 'shot' in the mind of the viewer.

Privilege

uses Rainer's approach in order to explore the issues of menopause and racism.

The very idea of centering a feature film on menopause, which, as Rainer makes clear in

Privilege,

has been culturally defined as

un

pleasurethe tail end of youth and eroticism, the epitome of the uncinematicis an explicit critique of the conventional cinema and its limited view of women. The fact that

Privilege

is an enjoyable film, fascinating even to rather conventional audiences (at least in my experience as an exhibitor), makes it a breakthrough, the ultimate cinematic magic trick, and a potential catalyst for the liberation of women and men from conventional definitions that have tended to constrict our lives in the most obvious ways.

The central narrative thread of

Privilege

is the reminiscences of Jenny, a white woman of middle age, about a particular, troubling moment early in her career as a dancer. In her 'hot flashback' Jenny recalls moving into an apartment in a comparatively high-rent building next door to her less affluent Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors, Carlos, Digna, and Stew. Jenny lives directly above Brenda, who is a lesbian. Like other neighborhood residents, Jenny becomes accustomed to the fights between Carlos and Digna. Soon after Digna is arrested and taken to Bellevue after a particularly violent fight, Carlos enters Brenda's apartment late at night, naked, and when Brenda screams, Jenny comes to her rescue. Ultimately, Brenda presses charges and Jenny, annoyed at the defense attorney's attempts to categorize her as a loose woman, perjures herself, saying she actually saw Carlos in Brenda's apartment, and she becomes lovers with the assistant district attorney. This central episode is elaborated by Rainer in characteristically anti-illusionist fashion: throughout her flashback, Jenny remains her current, menopausal age; Digna becomes an invisible (to the other characters) commentator, particularly about Jenny's love affair with the wealthy assistant district attorney; and the narrative is regularly interrupted by other kinds of information, including dramatizations of dreams.

Interwoven with the basic melodramatic situation are numerous interviews about menopause with Jenny and with many women who are clearly not characters in the film's central fiction. The interviews are

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conducted by Rainer herself, with the exception of the interview with Jenny, which is conducted by 'Yvonne Washington,' Rainer's African-

American alter ego. Essentially, the use of this alter ego allows Rainer to develop two levels of inquiry in the film. The first involves menopause, as it affects women of various economic and ethnic backgrounds, positively and negatively. The second involves race: 'Yvonne Washington' is able to explore and critique Jenny's attitudes and the degree to which the shape of her thinking is determined not simply by her maturation as a woman, but by her privileged social status as a white woman with financial resources. Or to put this another way: since Jenny's flashback is based on Rainer's experiences after first moving to New York City, 'Yvonne Washington' allows Rainer to interrogate herself as she questions other women. More fully than either

Near the Big Chakra

(which includes the vulvas of two black women among the thirty-seven) or

Riddles of the Sphinx

(where the relationship of Louise and Maxine crosses racial lines, without comment by either woman, and where the issue of the relationship of ethnic background and social class is raised only by implicationwe see a black woman cooking for the telephone operators in the company lunchroom),

Privilege

explores the complex set of relationships and distinctions between the loss (and gain) of 'privilege' as a result of menopause and as a function of ethnic background. For Rainer the issue is not simply the woman's body as an index of Western society'sand the Western camera'sattitudes about gender; it is also an index of attitudes about race and language (Digna's marginalization as a Spanish speaker and the marginalization of other forms of languagesystems of signing employed by the deaf, for exampleare also explored in the film).

As a trio of films,

Near the Big Chakra, Riddles of the Sphinx,

and

Privilege

chart a trajectory of feminist concern over the past two decades. In a sense, each film builds from and subsumes the concerns of the previous films:

Riddles of the Sphinx

is as much a response to the fetishization of a restricted sense of the female body as Severson's film is; and

Privilege

responds both to that issue and to the issue of women's economic marginalization within modern social structures (and in the films that reflect these social structures). Together, the three films reflect a growing awareness that our assumptions about the female body and the economic marginalization of women must be conditioned by an awareness of the ways in which our 'local' experiences of such issues are contextualized, both

inter

nationally, by the experiences of women and men around the world, and

intra

nationally, by virtue of the fact that nearly every modern nation has become a nexus of racial and ethnic experiences.