Ilse Aichinger, 1948
Lilly Axster
Katherine Klinger
Conversations
Hannah Arendt, 1950
Hannah Fröhlich
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai
Conversations
Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
Dagmar Fink
Tom Holert
Conversations
Billie Holiday, 1939
Jamika Ajalon
Rúbia Salgado
Conversations
Adrian Piper, 1983
Belinda Kazeem
Anna Kowalska
Conversations
Yvonne Rainer, 1990
Monika Bernold
Shirley Tate
Reference text Rainer long
Reference text Rainer short
Conversations
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 Privilege
Yvonne Rainer, 1990
CU—close-up
LS—long shot
MCU—medium close-up
MS—medium shot
MLS—medium long shot
sync—the visual image is synchronized with the soundtrack
v-o—voice over
MCU, JENNY.
JENNY: Don’t expect me to get it right. Just telling you this story in its barest form took all of my gumption. I’m scared of you now in ways I never was before.
MCU, YVONNE W.
YVONNE W.: I don’t expect you to “get it right”. I guess I’d just like you to put yourself in my shoes so I don’t have to explain everything. I’d like to forget about racism just as much as you. The difference is, you can … and I can’t.
Black-and-white CU of BRENDA’s back as she sits down in the foreground in the Eames chair. It faces the couch on which CARLOS is seated in MCU. He stares intently at her, not speaking, as camera zooms slowly in to extreme CU of his face during the following v-o.
CARLOS (v-o): She has an avid curiosity about my sexual endowments. She enjoys imagining the fucking that goes on among blacks and Latinos on this block. She thinks we are “looser” and less inhibited because we come from the steaming tropics. What’s weird is she’s the one who kept her shades up and walked around with no clothes on.
CARLOS (sync): When you look at me you see a dark continent, something unknown, exciting, frightening, exotic, different.
[Color.] BRENDA goes into her building. CARLOS shakes his head in a bemused way. Cut to MS of STEW still seated next door. CARLOS enters frame and sits down. He again addresses the camera. His Spanish is rendered in English subtitles.
CARLOS (in Spanish): Like an angel of love, yes? She is my freedom and my bondage. Forbidden to me. Also her building—forbidden to me. Right next door, but I can’t live there. It might as well be Sutton Place.
CARLOS (in English): The intermingled white, black and tan world of Puerto Rico is foreign to people in the U.S. Puerto Rico is inhabited by people of many colors, and these colors are not associated with different ranks. My friend Stew was always riding me:
STEW: “You fuckin’ yeller-faced bastard! Yuh goddamned Negro with a white man’s itch! Y’all think that bein’ Porto Rican lets you off the hook? Tha’s the trouble. Too damn many you black Porto Ricans got yer eyes closed. Too many goddamned Negroes all over this goddamned world feels like you does. Jus’ ’cause you kin rattle off some different kinda language don’ change your skin one bit. Whatta y’all think? That the only niggers in the world are in this fucked-up country? They is all over this whole damn world. Man, if they’s any black people up on the moon talkin’ that moon talk, they is still Negroes. Git it? Negroes!”
Intertitle on word processor screen.
Piri Thomas, 1967
On the far side of a pond a WHITE MAN IN BERMUDA SHORTS stands watching his three dogs cavort at the water’s edge.
CARLOS (v-o): […] In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness…
MLS, CARLOS sitting and smoking on a park bench. A WHITE MAN IN A SUIT and carrying a briefcase walks by. CARLOS continues to speak in v-o.
…provided for me by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.
LS, edge of pond. A PREGNANT WHITE WOMAN in a white summer dress is throwing breadcrumbs to off-screen ducks while a FIVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL beside her blows bubbles with a bottle and wire loop. The BUSINESSMAN from the previous shot walks down the path behind them and out of the frame. CARLOS’s v-o continues. At the beginning of the shot the WOMAN points to something off-screen.
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
Cut to ANOTHER WHITE MAN, walking his dog down a path. Camera follows them as they pass the MOTHER and CHILD by the lake, stays on MOTHER and CHILD as MAN and dog leave the frame. […] CU of CHILD blowing bubbles.
“Mama, see the Negro. I’m frightened.” […]
Black-and-white MCU of CARLOS on BRENDA’s sofa. Camera zooms in to CU during following v-o.
CARLOS (v-o): I moved towards the other … and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared.
Black (no) image. […] CARLOS on park bench as before. [Color.]
CARLOS (sync): I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics, and I was battered down by tom-toms,…
A 1940s cartoon of Florida alligator menacing a black infant.
…slave ships, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, and above all […]: “Sho’ good eatin’.” […]
Intertitle on word processor […].
Frantz Fanon, 1952
DIGNA in Bellevue. A Puerto Rican woman in her late twenties, she is wearing a blue-and-white seersucker hospital robe. She sits in front of a peeling, yellowed wall and addresses the camera […] in English.
DIGNA: […] Why me and not Carlos? Why me beat up and why me in here? […] Does the way I tweeze my eyebrows make men unable to resist hitting me?
DIGNA […] addresses the camera in Spanish, which is translated in English subtitles.
DIGNA: Today religion and moral principles have been replaced by thorazine for the control of the female mind, especially the Latina female mind. Tell me, why are Puerto Rican women in this country more vulnerable to mental illness than the general population? Why do we not flourish here? Psychiatrists have different names for our condition. Most of you would be labeled manic-depressive. Me they call schizophrenic.
/
Privilege by Yvonne Rainer, 16 mm, color and black & white, 103 min., 1990. In: Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who …, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 1999. The gaps between the selected passages mark large cuts. Quotes: pp. 329, 318, 303, 321-323, 306, 301.
© Yvonne Rainer 1990 (film) & 1999 (script)
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