Yvonne Rainer – MURDER and Murder, 1996, 113mins / 1hr, 53mins.
Film Format: 16mm / DVD, Color

MURDER and murder is a middle-aged love story between Mildred, a life-long lesbian, and Doris, who is in love with a woman for the first time. An unflinching meditation on female aging, lesbian sexuality and breast cancer in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance. MURDER and murder is an unflinching look at female aging, lesbian sexuality and breast cancer in an age and culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance. In her 7th feature film, director Yvonne Rainer delivers an emotionally courageous, intellectually challenging work which is at once soap opera, black comedy, love story and political meditation.Cast: Joanna Merlin, Kathleen Chalfant, Caherine Kellner, Isa Thomas, Yvonne Rainer, Alice Playten, Kendal Thomas, Rod McLachlan, Jennie Moreau, Sasha Martin, Barbara Haas, Rainn Wilson.

Background

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 launch of her film career Rainer has inspired audiences to think about what they see, intermingling 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 humour, has made her, one of the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker in recent decades, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.