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movement from the space of Sirkian melodrama [melodrama as epitomized in the films of Douglas Sirk] into the space of the psyche.
Yvonne Rainer
MacDonald:
In recent years every time there's a new Yvonne Rainer film, I read someplace, "This is new and accessible work from Yvonne Rainer . . . "
Rainer:
Right. They said that about the last one, and I've heard it about
Privilege
.
MacDonald:
I didn't find
The Man Who Envied Women
[1985] more accessible than earlier workthough there were elements of it I likedbut I do find
Privilege
extremely accessible. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and when I screened it as part of my film series in Utica I discovered it was accessible to a relatively general audience.
Rainer:
This is a mainstream-geared audience?
MacDonald:
Pretty much. My series has a reputation, so the audience usually expects something unusual, but they're certainly not shy about leaving. At
Privilege,
I don't believe more than five people left, out of seventy-five or eighty. I've always assumed that your refusal to provide certain kinds of conventional pleasure was a defiance of what the audience has come to expect. But this film includes the audience in a new way.
Rainer:
In Australia, someone asked meafter screening
Privilege
"Why are you so committed to depriving the audience of pleasure?"
MacDonald:
They said that after
Privilege
?
Rainer:
After
Privilege
.
MacDonald:
That surprises me.
Rainer:
I was astounded because I have never thought of myself as depriving anyone of pleasure, unless a shot or a sequence had a specific political agenda, like the tracking shot into the nude in
Film About a Woman Who
. . . . There was a specific mission there. It was an arduous experience for the audience to stay with that shot:
no
one could derive pleasure from
that
image of the woman's body. But in the general course of things,
I
always thought I was introducing
new
pleasuresthe pleasure of the text, of reading.
MacDonald:
It's true; there are pleasures in many of the stories told in your films but not much
visual
pleasure, especially in the films after
Film About a Woman Who
. . . : that film and
Lives of Performers
[1972] have an unpretentious elegance and sensuality that's lacking in later films, especially from
Journeys from Berlin/1971
[1980] and
The Man Who Envied Women
. So when
Privilege
struck me as thoroughly pleasurable, I thought that since, as Jenny says at the beginning of the film, the subject