"With stunning, captivating footage of Rainer's dances and films, spanning decades, and with her own words and those of astute commentators to complement what we see, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer brings this vital part of the history of the modern arts alive. We are not likely to ever get a better account of this pioneering figure's enormous contribution."

Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary

"Yvonne Rainer's influence on postwar American dance and avant-garde cinema has been incalculable and Jack Walsh’s documentary is a lively and accessible introduction to her life and work. The film expertly weaves Rainer’s own stories and reflections on her colorful life, beginning in the Beat Era in San Francisco in the 1950s, through the NY avant-garde Art World of the 1960’s, to the politically charged feminist art movements of the 1970’s and 80’s and Queer aesthetics in the present, with analysis of her prolific art practice by renowned collaborators, dance and cinema studies scholars and across a range of archival materials and excerpts from her dances and films ... gives a rare inside picture of the “why” and “how” of artistic innovation and experimentation and provides the perfect context for the study of Rainer’s work in a range of upper level and graduate courses in avant-garde film and dance, women in cinema, performance studies and contemporary art history."

Jeffrey Skoller, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies,

University of California, Berkeley

"Like Yvonne Rainer, the artist whose body of work this film captivatingly distills, Feelings Are Facts is in elegant balance, illustrating through Rainer’s groundbreaking experiments a model for an artistic practice in which sociopolitical concerns inform and infuse aesthetic expressions. For those educators who see their classrooms as sites for nurturing an urgent critical inquiry and creative praxis, this is an invaluable instruction."
Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Assistant Professor, Film, Media, &Theatre, Georgia State University

"Yvonne Rainer is a pioneering artist and feminist whose work challenges expectations at every turn, who battled sexism in the art world of the Sixties and navigated the upheavals of feminist theory and politics in the late 20th century. In the film, Rainer discusses the influences on her work and the unconventional and uncompromising choices she made throughout her life and career. The film is beautifully made, thought-provoking and engaging -- ideal for showing in both introductory and advanced women and gender studies courses."

Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

University of California, Berkeley

"... essential viewing for students of film and dance or, for that matter, anyone interested in understanding how artists in the 1960s and 1970s managed to carve out a space for challenging cultural and political norms. I know I will use it classes on the history of film and of

radicalism in the US."

Victor Silverman, Professor of History and American Studies,

Pomona College

"Paints a rich and informative picture of one of America's most significant, intelligent, and protean artists of the past half century ... the film should find a natural place in courses about dance history, avant-garde and feminist film, the postwar American art world, and interrogations of the political and intermedial turns in cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s."

Susan Felleman, Professor, Art History & Film and Media Studies

University of South Carolina

"... superbly documents the power, grace, intelligence, and wit through which Yvonne Rainer's self-described "recalcitrant, undancerly body" transformed modern dance. A smart and lovely film, I'll teach Feelings Are Facts in my gender studies classes to illustrate the

"social choreographies" through which individual physical movements can inspire social and intellectual movements on a larger scale."

Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership

Mills College