Film About a Woman Who...

this is so boring and is basically an attempt at making something beautiful but instead feels outdated and so boring. for one point during the film a family is shown on screen just sitting there for 5 minutes doing absolutely nothing. we had to watch this in class and i was trying my hardest to not fall asleep...had i seen this outside of class i would of turned it off after the first 15 minutes. not only does this film not have any point but the acting and the writing is terrible. the interaction between the main characters is not even believable and you just wish they would give up on each other already

Well, for starters, this film is not french new wave or whatever the other person has called it. This movie comes at more or less the tail end of American structuralist cinema and is informed partly by that, and partly by 1960s dance (cunningham, et al) and minimalism (morris, andre, judd, etc). To say nothing of Maya Deren.

Rainer's second feature length film continues a number of ideas that she has carried with her from her career in the 1960s (choreography and dance). It's a shame that the other reviewer (above) didn't give this film more of a chance, because it's a remarkable document from a time when very, very few women were making feature length films. Rainer's movie challenged numerous ideas about cinematic narrative and is credited in many ways for pushing open the doors for feminist film theory. (See the journal Camera Obscura, or Laura Mulvey's essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, for example). If it appears clunky at times, consider when it was made, and who made it. It's nothing short of a radical break in the history of cinema, and should be required viewing for anyone even remotely considering ideas about feminism and the illusion of cinema.