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some way and that there would be no central person you identified with. There's always a lot of personal material in my films, but it's diffused, decentralized, contravened by antinarrative techniques.
MacDonald:
There's a healthy recognition that even if something is personal to oneself that one's personality shares concerns, ideas, feelings, whatever with lots of other people.
Rainer:
Right.
MacDonald:
Your characteristic way of putting texts others have written into the mouths of your characters certainly diffusesor makes more complexour sense of their identity,
and
it provides the viewer with a précis of issues that you and many other people have been thinking about over a period of time. Did that technique come out of your performance work?
Rainer:
It may be related to the separation of persona and speech in some of my early dances. A person would recite a story by someone else in the first person, but their body would not be expressing that story; the body would be involved in some other continuity. I was always working for disparities between sound and image. So yes, that carried over into the films. Also, quotation is an expedient way to produce characters: I don't have to worry about psychological credibility. And it gets certain texts out:
someone
has to speak these texts that I'm interested in. It's always a question in my films who's going to speak what, especially where the characters don't have a direct connection to what or the way in which they speak. In
Privilege
Carlos speaks a text that does reflect on his life, but a text that because of his class and education, he wouldn't normally speak. I've always used my actors as mouthpieces. It's a way of talking about the spoken and the speaker at the same time, and to alternate between them: when Carlos is speaking about color, sitting on the stoop, all of a sudden he says, "Hola! Brenda! Qué tal!" as she passes by, and there's a naturalistic scene where we see him as a street person making advances to his neighbor. It's not "realistic," but it can certainly be followed by the spectator. Everyone has that potential to "speak" themselves in some kind of detached way, and also to enact themselves.
MacDonald:
I think it's only
semi
-unrealistic because we're always mouthing ideas that we get from other people . . .
Rainer:
Yes, absolutely.
MacDonald:
But mostly we disguise, or try to disguise, that we're doing it.
Rainer:
Right. Right. It happens daily. You're impressed with something someone has said or that you've read and you incorporate it into your next conversation.
MacDonald:
I remember reading about a show at the Collective that