Kristina Talking Pictures

Rainer's third feature is arguably the closest she has yet come to the Godard wing of 'art cinema'. Like her other movies, it's a shifting collage of narrations (some visual, mostly verbal), loosely anchored in the central relationship between Kristina and her lover Raoul. Except that Kristina, generally sketched as a middle-class NYC artist concerned about the environment, about relationships and such-like, is played by several different women...and given a personal history (archive flashbacks) as a former lion tamer in Europe who came to America to work as a choreographer. Dunno if this is 'political art', but it's certainly lively, unpredictable, and in several senses challenging. Also, it prominently features a photo of James Cagney.