Yvonne Rainer

An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.

Salomania reconstructs a dance: the ‘dance of the seven veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé. Also shown and rehearsed are sections from ‘Valda’s Solo,’ which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova’s film.

Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Two nudes, a man and a woman, interact with each other and a large balloon in a white living room. Performed by Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold. Camerawork by Phill Niblock.

The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvonne Rainer) embark on a quest for self-transformation, which quickly heads towards destruction as they are subjected to Madame X's sadistic, erotic escapades.

Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.