Kristina Talking Pictures (1976) by Yvonne Rainer
Thursday, March 19, 1987, 8:00 pm
Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures
Yvonne Rainer’s third feature film (1976) was her first in color. It extends her exploration of interweaving narrative with theoretical and political concerns. The film’s narrative is simple: Kristina, a lady lion-tamer from Budapest comes to New York to be a dancer, has an affair with Raoul, a seaman, who leaves her. Within a form that allows for shifting correlations between word and image, persons and performer, enactment and illustration, Kristina… circles in a narrowing spiral toward its primary concerns: the uncertain relation of public act to personal fate, the possibility for disparity between public directed conscience and private will. “In its multi-levelled disjointed style, Kristina… may be seen to revive the lessons of Duchamp, the Cubists; even the epic, to create a melodrama for our time, one that speaks to the fractured sensibility of anyone living in the difficult world of modern urban culture.” — B. Ruby Rich