“Yvonne Rainer comes to film from dance/ performance in which she has been a major figure.... Rainer's works play on our understanding of what is real and what is fictitious, often intentionally obfuscating the narrative and distancing the viewer through techniques such as discontinuities between image and sound track; ‘tertiary' performance (‘performing someone else's material in a style completely different from... the original')... the absence of characters' names, thereby frustrating attempts to identify characters' psyches with their physical selves.... (T)he use of cliché and the discourse of soap opera coupled with these and other distancing devices... enable Rainer to handle ‘ideas of passion, of love and ambivalence' in ways which are novel and viable.” --Annette Michelson.
“Journeys from Berlin/1971 is a fascinating exploration of the parallels between the psychological and the political. Specifically, the concerns raised during a woman's psychoanalytic session with a therapist and certain observations on repression and terrorism in contemporary Germany are presented in a similar, corresponding light. Throughout the film, the viewer is challenged toward a new awareness concerning politics and the cinema.
“Ms. Rainer's previous films are Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who... (1974), and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976).” --Center for Public Cinema, New York