Here is the first film from avant garde film-maker Yvonne Rainer, showing as part of a retrospective of her work at the ICA in London, affording viewers a chance to appreciate the wonky, wonderful weirdness that was integral to the New York experimental art scene in the early 1970s. Aptly enough for an artist who started her career in the dance world (having studied with such luminaries as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham), Rainer grounds this in the world of dance, opening with a rehearsal of a company running through different moves. Don’t be alarmed if no sound is coming through – it’s meant to be that way. Rainer plays throughout with audience expectations and need for narrative closure, offering little titbits of story and then whipping them away from us in juddering ruptures with convention.
Drill down a bit and it’s not impossible to find a narrative about some kind of love triangle between one man and two women, who may or may not be the performers we see on screen. Over still photographs and snippets of moving theatre, voices are heard reading, with remorselessly flat intonation, a script in which lead dancer Valda (Valda Setterfield) longs for her lover Fernando (Fernando Torm). The plot often doesn’t match up with the action on screen, which is filmed in pencilly black and white 16mm stock by cinematographer Babette Mangolte. (Mangolte would go on to shoot Chantal Akerman’s 1975 classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, recently voted by critics as the greatest film of all time.) Later on, the performers stand frozen in tableaux as the camera rolls, apparently acting out scenes from a dance version of Frank Wedekind’s classic play Lulu.
The cumulative effect is an immersion in 1970s art practice in all its meta-narrative incoherence and mess. Don’t try to understand it, just let it wash over you and you’re likely to find it oddly mesmeric.
• Lives of Performers screens on 17 August at the ICA London (with a Q&A with Yvonne Rainer), as part of a Yvonne Rainer Retrospective, which runs until 27 August
