Rainer is the avant-garde's most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren... more likely, she's the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York... That Rainer's work engages that of Godard and Brakhage, arguably the two most powerfully original filmmakers of the past 30 years, is another measure of her centrality. But addicted as she is to the life of her times, it seems perverse to segregate Rainer in an avant-garde ghetto. The relationship of psychodrama to the films of actor-auteurs like Charlie Chaplin or Barbra Streisand is a fallow field for academics. Nevertheless, it's apparent that Rainer has many points of contact with her fellow toiler in the vineyards of urban sophistication, Woody Allen. Jim Hoberman, in: Village Voice, New York, April 8, 1986

(...) It is the first time - after plunging into the production of experimental films in 1972 - that former choreographer Yvonne Rainer has created real characters without compromising either her radical approach nor her sense of humour. The filmmaker appears, fragile and ambiguous, dressed in a tuxedo. At one point she unbuttons her dinnerjacket to show where her breast has been amputated: a wonderful gesture beyond shamelessness or pathos. It shows that Yvonne Rainer even locates a more accessible film on the site of her body, which she has always used as a ,site of scandal' since her early experimental films. The constructive scandal of MURDER and murder is the fact that this body, marked by old age and the threat of death by cancer, dares to love, even love beyond the conventional norms. Bérénice Reynaud, in: Cahiers du cinéma, Nr. 509, Paris 1996

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was a founder of the Judson Dance Theatre, which became a vital force in modern dance. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances and, in 1975, she made a complete transition to film. She completed her first feature-length film, Lives of Performers, in 1972. Six more have followed and they have all been screened widely in the States and elsewhere. Not only has she written extensively, with articles appearing in such publications as ,Camera Obscura', ,Afterimage', ,Wide Angle' and ,Screen', Rainer has frequently lectured and has been teaching at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum in New York since 1974. Rainer was a member of the Board of Directors of the Collective for Living Cinema from 1980 until its demise in 1991. In 1988 she and Bérénice Reynaud organised a two-week event entitled ,Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation' at the Collective for Living Cinema. Rainer's work evinces a post-modern concern with inter-textuality, combining and recombining snippets from many different media and art forms. Her films are dense and multi-layered, combining irony, passion, self-interrogation and intellect.

1972: Lives of Performers. 1974: Film About a Woman Who... (Forum 1975). 1976: Kristina Talking Pictures. 1980: Journeys From Berlin/1971 (Forum 1980). 1985: The Man Who Envied Women. 1990: Privilege (Forum 1991). 1996: MURDER and murder.