Yvonne Rainer in Person The latest film by Yvonne Rainer, dancer-choreographer, performance artist and leading American avant-garde filmmaker (A Film About a Woman Who, Journeys from Berlin, The Man Who Envied Women), is a witty, genuinely subversive treatment of a subject that seems to be as taboo in cinema as it is in society: menopause. "The most remarkable thing was the silence that emanated from friends and family regarding the details of my single middle-age...Now that I did not appear to be looking for a man, the state of my desires seemed of no interest to anyone..." Rainer's protagonist, Jenny (Alice Spivak), has agreed to be interviewed by a friend about her experiences with menopause. Her candid and revealing observations are punctuated by a "hot flash-back," a Rashomon-like melange of memory and melodrama revealing an experience she has kept secret for twenty-five years. Privilege is set in motion by its non-narrative "data": clips from an old black-and-white educational film on menopause, segments of informal video-8 interviews with women who talk of menopause and aging, and a fictional recreation of a speech by Helen Caldicott (played by Rainer). "The critical strategies multiply around the facts and effects of change in women's bodies, intersecting repeatedly but not repetitively with the unequal economies of race, gender and class. Incongruities and discontinuities-a character-commentator whom no other character sees, a working-class Puerto Rican delivering a diatribe lifted line-for-line from Franz Fanon-transform the process of psychological identification into political critique without jettisoning the question of identity" (production notes).