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Volleyball (Yvonne Rainer, 1967)
🕑 Added 2021-08-22 03:19:42 +0000 UTC
As I mentioned on Letterboxd, this is less of a film in the conventional sense than a cinematic gesture drawing. This was made before Rainer had switched to making films full-time, and was still best known as a pioneering minimalist choreographer. If we think about Volleyball as positioned somewhere between a dance film and a motion study, it's a bit easier to see what Rainer was up to (even if one doesn't necessarily appreciate it).
In most dance pieces, the feet are the primary attraction. And feet are indeed given pride of place in Volleyball, although they don't move a great deal. Instead, they are the immovable object(s) that halt the movement of an otherwise-rolling volleyball. Minimalist dance was primarily concerned with task-oriented movement, recontextualizing the gestures of daily life. But Volleyball is a bit different. It's almost like an experiment in physics, reduced to the barest of bones. We have a sphere, and a plane, and I guess the legs are two sorta-cylinders. But the main point is that Rainer is demonstrating micro-relations of slope, friction, and momentum. When it comes to Newtonian motion, it is literally the least you can do.
