Program 1: The Man Who Envied Women

Around a familiar theme—the breakup of a marriage—Yvonne Rainer constructs a wickedly funny account of the self-satisfied womanizer, Jack Deller. Sitting in a chair facing the camera, he rambles on about women, whose visual absence runs through the entire film. On the soundtrack we hear their questions and comments, by turns enraged or laconic, both stressing and also subverting Deller’s self-assured discourse. The location and the vanishing points of his often ridiculous speech are increasingly cast into doubt. In the opening scene he seems to be speaking to his analyst from a chair, (“Doctor, I'll tell you all you want to know about my sex life.”), then he is speaking in front of a screen where film clips are projected. Deller’s character is divided between two performers, thus doubling the problem case. The spoken words are taken from texts found in film and everyday culture, from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory. Aside from the theme of the failed (heterosexual) relationship, further fields of conflict get explored—the housing shortage and gentrification in New York during the 1980s, abortion rights, the violent interventions of the US in Latin America. A never-ending collage made up of contradictory levels of meaning results in producing ever new connections and contexts. “Rainer is not trying for some kind of well-mannered correctness or a masterly, fatherly notion of ‘transcendent intellectual clarity’; rather, she tends toward a type of tumbling process, an unbalancing of power, language, and the body.” (Barbara Kruger, Artforum 1986)