Archiving Feeling in Yvonne Rainer's Journeys from Berlin/1971

Abstract

Yvonne Rainer's third and most explicitly political feature-length film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (US/UK/West Germany, 1979) explores the relationship between personal and political trauma through the lens of the instability and violence that ravaged West Germany during the period commonly referred to as the German Autumn (1977). Through a close reading of the film's formal structure, this essay argues that Journeys from Berlin/1971 represents Rainer's attempt to imagine a feminist counterpublic in the form of a queer “archive of feelings.” This essay traces the film's narrative junctures, comprised of five distinct and incongruous tracks layered and juxtaposed in a collage-like form, arguing that Rainer creates points of connection between scenes of domestic intimacy and political violence. In doing so, Journeys bridges the typically privatized and historically negated realm of everyday traumas of women and queer subjects with the public space of political trauma and asserts the primacy of both within national histories. This essay further argues that the female revolutionaries who emerge within these charged touchpoints act as figures of queer possibility. Their explicit and often spectacular refusals and failures — of the liberatory promises of bourgeois motherhood on the one hand, and political activism on the other — deny any possibility of a reparative fantasy within the film. Made during a period of significant aesthetic and personal change in Rainer's life following her attempted suicide, the film's form as an alternative archive of feminist resistance ultimately acts as both catharsis and a means of bringing this alternative community into being.