Yvonne Rainer: Feelings Are Facts: A Life (2006)

“In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer’s one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America.

Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances—including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan—and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
Writing Art series
ISBN 9780262182515, 0262182513
xvi+473 pages

Reviews: John Rockwell (NYT, 2006), Ian White (Afterall, 2007), Daniel Ross (Screening the Past, 2007), Deborah Jowitt (Dance Research, 2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (62 MB, no OCR)

Lotte H. Eisner: Fritz Lang (1976)

“Fritz Lang, almost alone among his fellow continental refugees, was able to make outstanding films in both his native Germany and his adopted Hollywood. The director of Metropolis and M and Dr. Mabuse came to America in 1934 and began a long and distinguished career that included such films as You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Rancho Notorious, and The Big Heat. He is a key figure in the history of film noir, bringing to the screen a fatalist’s vision of a menacing world of criminals, misfits, and helpless victims, and providing a distinctive visual look to every film he directed. This film-by-film study of Lang’s oeuvre by one of the great film historians combines personal insight—Eisner and Lang had a long standing friendship—with deep historical understanding of Lang’s roots in German culture and cinema. Both true modernists, Eisner and Lang are perfectly matched, as this book clearly demonstrates.” (back cover)

Publisher Secker and Warburg, London, 1976
Reprint, Da Capo Press, New York, 1986
ISBN 0306802716
416 pages
via dreyer

WorldCat

PDF (158 MB)

Charles Chaplin: My Autobiography (1964)

“Born into a theatrical family, Chaplin’s father died of drink while his mother, unable to bear the poverty, suffered from bouts of insanity, Chaplin embarked on a film-making career which won him success, as well as intense controversy. His autobiography was written almost entirely without reference to documentation – simply as a feat of memory by a 75 year old man. It is a vivid reconstruction of a poor London childhood, the music hall and then his prodigious life in the movies.”

First published by Simon and Schuster, 1964
Publisher Pocket Books, New York, 1966
560 pages

Review (F.W. Dupee, The New York Review of Books, 1964)

PDF, PDF (65 MB, no OCR)