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ers; in shot seven, she talks with other workers about child care as a union issue; in shot eight, we see Louise (with Anna) and her friend Maxine whom she met at the day-care center; in shot nine, Louise is at a playground with Anna; in shot ten, in Louise's mother's garden where her mother is looking after Anna while she and Maxine look at old photographs; in shot eleven, Louise and Maxine are at Chris's studio where he shows them his recent film and tapes (about artist Mary Kelly) and Louise tells him she wants to sell the houseshe's moving in with Maxine; in shot twelve, Louise and Maxine talk about one of Maxine's dreams at Maxine's apartment; and in shot thirteen, Louise and Anna visit the Egyptian Room at the British Museum.
The activities revealed in "Louise's Story Told in Thirteen Shots" are the polar opposite of the activities that would be the focus of any conventional narrative film. Each shot focuses on a dimension of Louise's life that would be, at most, the background for erotic (and/or violent) adventures in a commercial movie. The film doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of the erotic from Louise's life (her relationship with Maxine may be an erotic one, though we never see any direct evidence of erotic engagement between the two women), but at no point is the erotic the "hook" for viewer interest. The pleasures of this cinematic text are formal and intellectual: the brilliant and often exhilarating 360-degree pans that define a new kind of cinematic space and an entirely original narrative structure; the densely suggestive mise-en-scene, which in every instance elaborates the implications of Louise's story; and the intricate mirror structureitself a reference to the "mirror" phase of childhood developmentthat informs the sections that frame "Louise's Story.'' For Mulvey and Wollen, the antidote to the conventional cinema's, depiction of women's bodies and its narrow sense of women's lives is not shock, not a reductio ad absurdum of its tendency to fetishize particular sectors of the body as in
Near the Big Chakra,
but a thoroughly imaginative and accomplished alternative to traditional cinematic narrative, and perhaps, a catalyst for a new, progressively feminist genre.
Privilege
(1990) is Yvonne Rainer's most recent addition to a filmmaking career of twenty years that has produced six feature films, a career that itself followed an influential career in dance/choreography/performance that began in the early sixties (see Rainer's
Work 196173
[New York and Halifax: New York University Press and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974]). Throughout her feature filmmaking, Rainer has attempted to respond to her audience's interest in melodrama without relying on the forms of cinematic pleasure that characterize industry films
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