“What Rainer was up to, after all, was the reinvention of melodrama as a genre, accented for the contemporary psyche.”—B. Ruby Rich

Namechecking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, Rainer continues to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature with unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul.

Kristina Talking Pictures has been restored in 4K by the Museum of Modern Art and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber is the sole worldwide distributor of this film.

This title is a digital-only release.

Other Rainer films include:

LIVES OF PERFORMERS (1972)
FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974)
JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1979)
THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985)
PRIVILEGE (1990)
MURDER AND MURDER (1996)

You can purchase the entire collection here.