“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.... the 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

“Journey's 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.
“B. Ruby Rich in the Chicago Reader had this to say on the film: ‘It significantly furthers the political implications of (Rainer's) previous work while continuing the development of formal strategies that challenge audience expectation... and slyly subvert the attachment to character identification. In her willingness to enter into the zone of ambiguity and to dare to fix meanings within its delicate balance of style, Rainer has made... an indicator of a new development that could rescue avant-garde film from its current paralysis.'
“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