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of menopause has come to
mean
unpleasure, you felt free to bring back other obvious kinds of cinematic pleasure as a defiance of the conventional attitude about menopause (and its implications for women), and as a way of modeling a new attitude about menopause (and about film).
Rainer:
That may be a way of reading the progression of my films, but it was certainly not uppermost in my mind.
What
has
been on my mind is an ongoing relationship to narrative, be it about pleasure or nonpleasure. If narrative is a way of
engaging
the audience, I've gone further and further toward narrative conventions, such as
plot:
this is the first of my films that has a semblance of a plot; it's the first film to use so many professional actors. This is the first film that does not have some overly long passage that people just can't stay withthe theoretical lecture in
The Man Who Envied Women,
or the anecdotal, voice-over material in
Journeys From Berlin
. I have always thought of my films as containing dry moments, but compensating for those with offsetting momentswith animals or stories or irony, humor.
MacDonald:
This is also the first film where you use extensive interviewing, isn't it?
Rainer:
Well, there's the housing hearing in
The Man Who Envied Women,
but I didn't interview those people. It's talking heads, people giving testimony.
MacDonald:
Women talking about their menopausal experiences is, actually, fascinating. Ironically, since it has been a taboo subject in movies, it has become as interesting as other taboo subjects that have to do with the body. The audienceat least the audience I saw the film withseemed excited to hear these revelations.
Rainer:
These are all young people?
MacDonald:
About half of them were college people; half were older people from the community.
Rainer:
I often get the question from men, Who's your audience? At one point I was saying, "It's young women and men, because young women don't
want
to know about menopause, and men have no reason to, have nothing at stake."
MacDonald:
Unless a man is deeply involved with someone struggling with menopause.
Near the end, the Yvonne Washington character says,
I try to monitor when my hot flashes occur. I'm watching a video cassette of "Sweet Sweetback's Baadaass Song." "Why does an embodiment of black protest have to be a stud?" flashes through my mind, and along comes a hot flash. I'm on the subway thinking about a friend. ''Forget that family crap," I think.
Flash
. . . Ready to leave, I put on my coat in an overheated room.