Privilege

In her idiosyncratically anarchic style, Yvonne Rainer tackles menopause, race and class with memoir, humour and the voices of many women.

In her sixth feature, Rainer further pushes against the confines of narrative filmmaking with this radical account of entering the menopausal stage of life. What starts as a simple interview format soon spins out into a multi-character metafiction: the fictitious African American director Yvonne Washington (Novella Nelson) takes over from Rainer as a kind of alter ego who engages in a conversation with old friend Jenny (Alice Spivak) about her current bodily experiences and “hot flashbacks” of her life as a young dancer in 60s Manhattan, amid the racial tensions of a gentrifying Lower East Side.

The story of Jenny’s interactions with her neighbours including a Puerto Rican couple – and, in turn, their own experiences – are probed and challenged by Washington, whose voice frequently interjects. In true Rainer fashion, these scenes are spliced with comically naive medical instructions, Lenny Bruce, fantastical stagings, cliché costuming and prose appearing on an early Apple computer monitor.

In what is perhaps her most formally complex film, Rainer doesn’t just place the unsaid onscreen; she elevates and playfully critiques it. An early cinematic example of intersectional feminism, Privilege is one of her most provocative and powerful works.

“Suggesting that political progress can’t emerge from conservative storytelling, Rainer evokes, with stylistic diversity, the expanded consciousness on which social change depends.” – The New Yorker