Journeys from Berlin/1971

Widely celebrated as a dancer and choreographer for her distinctive style and as a co-founder of the influential Judson Dance Theater, Yvonne Rainer turned to filmmaking in the early 1970s, after several years of incorporating her 16mm films into dances and performances. Her fourth feature, JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971, is a collage-like meditation on radicalism, repression, and the contradictions between political and private life.

Inspired by Rainer’s experiences living in West Berlin in 1976 and 1977, when the activities of the Red Army Faction and the state’s response to them were at their height, the film proceeds through a series of radically juxtaposed fragments. Street and landscape images, intertitles and excerpts from Rainer’s teenage diary are interwoven with the voices of an unseen New York couple, debating revolutionary violence and political radicalism while preparing dinner.

Alongside these fragments is an extraordinary extended monologue by art and film critic Annette Michelson, who shares her erotic history and accompanying ruminations with a therapist. At once an essay, psychoanalytic inquiry, and political meditation, JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 refuses easy connections between its fragments. Its meaning emerges instead through the friction between them, as Rainer moves between the historical and the personal, the rational and the erotic.

Michelson’s performance is central to this complex architecture: every gesture was elaborately choreographed by Rainer over a nine-month period, bringing the precision of her work in dance into dialogue with the freedoms and disruptions of cinematic form. The result is a dense and provocative work that asks how political radicalism is remembered and represented.

De Cinema and DE SINGEL present this film in the context of Alex Baczyński-Jenkin’s MALIGN JUNCTION (GOODBYE, BERLIN), a poignant choreography that oscillates between stasis, loss, and the fractured promise of progress. Tickets for the performance are available here.