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you and Bérénice Reynaud curated ["Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation," the Collective for Living Cinema, April 25May 8, 1988 (the program and related papers were published as the Summer/Autumn 1990 issue of
Motion Picture
)]. It was controversial.
Rainer:
Because it covered feminist films and British black films and African films. It swept with a really wide brush. We were taken to task for that.
MacDonald:
Who took you to task?
Rainer:
Coco Fusco, in
Screen
and in
Afterimage
.
MacDonald:
What was her take on the show?
Rainer:
Well, the name of her piece was "Fantasies of Oppositionality" [
Afterimage,
vol. 16, no. 5 (December 1988), and
Screen,
vol. 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988)]. The tack she took was that white experimental filmmakers and psychoanalytic feminists are trying to make a bridge between themselves and black filmmakers or blacks in general, in terms of marginalization, and that by not examining our own "otherness"in the panel discussionswe "re-centered" our whiteness. It was a hard lesson, though I still feel Coco's overkill approach was not entirely justified.
MacDonald:
In
Privilege,
the Yvonne Washington character makes that argument.
Rainer:
Yes, she's taken up a version of that criticism.
MacDonald:
Were you already at work on this project at that point?
Rainer:
Yes. But the Yvonne Washington/Jenny face-off hadn't been written.
MacDonald:
How much response to the film by African-Americans have you seen? In Utica the audience was about twenty percent African-American. It was pretty much the same audience that had, earlier in the fall, seen
Sidewalk Stories
[1990]. At that earlier screening, I was shocked to realize that some young African-Americans in the audience had a hard time watching the couple in
Sidewalk Stories
kiss, apparently because they weren't young and attractive enough for the movies. So I wondered how middle-aged women discussing menopause would affect a similar student clientele. As it turned out, there seemed to be an appreciation for the kinds of African-American women who show up in the film and the way in which they're presented, and present themselves.
Rainer:
I've had very little response from nonwhites so far. I took the film to the Frederick Douglass Institute of African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. I expected at least a fifty-fifty balance of races in the audience, but it was an almost totally white crowd. Karen Fields, who is the head of that institute, was very appreciative of the film. In fact, I remember she said, "How did you come to deal with something as explosive as a black on white rape, with such restraint?"