MURDER and murder

United States

1996

113 Min

Color

English

Currently 0.0/5 Stars.
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CAST Joanna Merlin, Kathleen Chalfant, Catherine Kellner, Isa Thomas, Jennie Moreau, Rod McLachlan, Kendal Thomas

SOUND Grant Maxwell

Berlinale (Forum): Teddy: Best Documentary/Essay Film, Berlinale (Teddy Twenty Tribute)

Synopsis

Doris and Mildred are two white women, one in her mid-50s and the other in her early 60’s, who become lovers and decide to set up housekeeping together. Mildred is the younger of the two, a lesbian for most of her adult life, and of upper-middle class origin. She is a tenured professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at a large University. Doris, in contrast, never attended college, has never had a steady job or predictable income, and has raised Flo, her grown daughter, single-handedly. Now, trying to be a performance artist, she finds herself in love with a woman for the first time in her life. Mildred shops at Barney’s; Doris plunders catalogues and thrift shops. Told mainly from Doris’ perspective, MURDER and murder investigates the pleasures, uncertainties and ambiguities of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies heterosexual romance. A parallel narrative unfolds via the commentary and presence of three other characters. Director Yvonne Rainer periodically pops up in the film to trouble the narrative with the asymmetries of her mastectomised chest and inquiries into the politics of breast cancer. Her role dovetails that of Doris, who also undergoes a mastectomy. Jenny, Doris’ mother and Young Mildred, Mildred’s 18-year-old self, are ghosts from the past, invisible to the protagonists but haunting the film’s present. MURDER and murder – insofar as it deals with lesbian sexuality, female aging and breast cancer, sets in motion an unholy grouping that reflects popular misconceptions and medical bias about disease; both articulating and critiquing these culturally and scientifically determined notions. Through humour, slapstick, visual metaphor, drama, quotations, commentary and Rainer’s characteristic panoply of formal and discursive strategies, notions of pathology are successively invoked and dismantled. Sometimes uncomfortable, always emotionally courageous and intellectually challenging, MURDER and murder is at once soap opera, black comedy, love story and political meditation. —Berlinale

Director

Yvonne Rainer

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”

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 one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975… read more

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”

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 one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.

In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).

Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F., NuArt-L.A, Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.

A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.

In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainer’s memoir “Feelings Are Facts: A Life”. —zeitgeistfilms.com

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