The genre-defying debut feature of legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer, which heralded an experimental new cinematic voice.

Shot by cinematographer Babette Mangolte – who would also begin a long collaboration with Chantal Akerman that year, starting with La chambre – Rainer’s first foray into feature filmmaking traverses the worlds of dance and cinema. The film opens with a scene of performers rehearsing the director’s performance piece Walk, She Said, introducing the audience to the four credited ‘protagonists’, including dancer Valda Setterfield, known for her work as a soloist with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Subtitled a melodrama, Lives of Performers plays with the convention of romance stories, introducing a love triangle between a man and two women that is disrupted by still images, intertitle cards in the style of a silent film, and a final sequence of 35 tableaux vivants inspired by G.S. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929). The director’s voice is a constant presence, interchangeably instructing choreography or asking intimate questions, as she blurs documentary and dance, fact and fiction.

“A fascinating immersion in radical art practice in all its meta-narrative incoherence and mess … Mesmeric.” – The Guardian