INTERVIEWS WITH

Elisabeth Subrin and “Speculative Biography” FAMOUS

content warning: sexual violence, sexual assault, racism

Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity and precision.

On February 9, 2023, the David Winton Bell Gallery opened The Listening Takes, a multichannel video installation by independent filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin. The triptych features three reenactments of a 1983 Cinéma Cinémas interview with the late French actress Maria Schneider— who is most often reduced to her infamous non-consensual sex scene with Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris. For the immersive thirty-minute runtime, Subrin asks audiences to examine and reexamine Schneider’s discussion of her traumatic experience in the early ’70s through the lens of a reenacted performance.

In the black box, Subrin erects three screens with a series of mirrors on the backs, synthesizing some of her previous visual art techniques and motifs to present Schneider’s experience in the film industry as synecdochal for all women. Subrin’s earlier video artworks Shulie, Sweet Ruin, and Lost Tribes and Promised Lands respectively stage an interview reenactment with Shulamith Firestone, undertake a biographical inquiry into the life of Maria Schneider, and harness a splitscreen projection; The Listening Takes casts three actresses—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—against three surfaces, allowing each performer to riff on Schneider’s mannerisms, affects, and words. Emphasizing in her February 9 artist talk how difference marks The Listening Takes, Subrin purports to avoid portraying Schneider as a singular, essentialized woman through multiracial casting. Multiplicity, as opposed to ‘pure’ recreation, she insists, is a necessary strategy for faithful biographical representation. She elaborates in her interview with The College Hill Independent:

My goal with reenactment is never to present the original work as the work was intended.

I’m interested in the legacy of harm and marginalization Maria speaks of, and continuing to explore these themes through others’ experiences… With reenactment, I see an opportunity to graft an intersectional analysis.

Subrin’s multiracial casting choices and script alterations immediately diverge from the original material. While Issa nearly replicates the original interview, with a strict adherence to the canonical text and close attention to Schneider’s downturned gaze and frustrated intonation, Maïga adds a line about pervasive whiteness in the film industry. Sandoval delivers her interpretation in English, and, notably, walks out at the end of her interview, displaying a degree of agency that Schneider may not have accessed when weighing her own career against her frustration.

Decontextualized, Subrin’s interest in difference may appear to be another hollow promise of diversity, as well as a desire to deify Schneider as a martyr for all women. In her artist statement for The Listening Takes, Subrin emphasizes how important she considers her actresses’ politics: Issa’s pro-Palestianian activism (she made headlines in 2018 when she touted a “Stop the attack on Gaza” sign on the Cannes red carpet), Maïga’s condemnation of the French film industry’s racism, and Sandoval’s advocacy against trans underrepresentation in the industry. Subrin also insists on mentioning her actresses’ countries of origin (“Manal, born in Lebanon,” reads the program), a choice that underscores her multiracial casting choices with a tint of directorial overcompensation.

“We did not set out to find a Middle Eastern to commenting on the “few roles that [she] really [wants to] do,” Sandoval reminds us that, for her, there are “few trans roles that [she] really [wants to] do.” Beyond these lines about underrepresentation, though, it’s impossible to glean any pertinent information about black women’s experiences in the French film industry or trans women’s in the Philippine industry. Moreover, Subrin’s obscure nods to her actresses’ ‘activism’ risk landing on deaf ears, not least because The Listening Takes is presented in an American gallery. actress, or an African actress, or a Southeast Asian actress,” Subrin explains. “Manal is so Maria, and the fit just felt right. I knew I wanted Aïssa for some time and even more so after her actions at the Césars last year… From the start, I knew I wanted to cast a trans actress, and when Isabel came along, I was also really excited by her work as a director because part of changing the culture is also changing who is behind the camera.”

Unbeknownst to anyone solely familiar with The Listening Takes, Maïga, along with 16 black French actresses, published a 2018 series of essays on tokenization and underrepresentation in the film industry called Noire n’est pas mon métier. Although her actresses’ histories were essential context for Subrin’s casting [decisions], The Listening Takes includes no such accounts of black women’s or trans women’s traumatic experiences in the film industry. Simply adding “white men” or “trans” to lines about women’s representation instead veers toward essentializing the experiences of its Marias under the banner of Schneider’s monolithic trauma from Tango, calling into question whether The Listening Takes constitutes a hearty speculation, to borrow Subrin’s pedagogical phrase, beyond its source material.

While Subrin justifies each casting decision, it’s notable that she refuses to restage an interview with a white actress with another white actress. Although it’s difficult to see how her actresses’ political allegiances come to the fore in a performance solely bent on appropriating a highly particular interview, Subrin emphasizes having encouraged her three actresses to reflect upon their own experiences when constructing their character.

“With [The Listening Takes], I see reenactment as a braiding of three fundamental questions: How do I, as Maria, feel about these questions, how does her response reflect how I feel as an actress in the film industry, and how do I feel about how Maria was treated?” Subrin tells the Indy

Subrin explains that she permitted Maïga and Sandoval to alter their performances in ways that might make them truer to black and trans women’s experiences in the contemporary film industry. Variations in the dialogue between reenactments include the change of “white men” and “trans” into Maria’s commentary on the lack of representation for women in the film industry. So, in addition to, “it’s men who have the power in cinema,” from the original interview, Maïga poses, “it’s white men who have the power in cinema.” Secondly, as opposed to just

Of course, Subrin’s interest in Schneider’s interview extends beyond the actress herself. Reenactment recurs across Subrin’s oeuvre as a method to translate the artist’s interest in famous women—usually actresses—into theses on how we imagine and might reimagine women’s, feminist, and urban histories. Through reenactment, she gets at the psychologies inherent to specific historical moments. But in her attempt to parse through Schneider’s particular vulnerabilities, Subrin reproduces the rhetoric of an everywoman, marked by single-word biographical inserts in otherwise personal text.

“My work has always been interested in how women are represented and I see actresses as an avatar for female representation,” she tells the Indy. (Here one might recall Bertolucci’s 2013 confession, “I wanted [Schneider’s] reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” the distinction itself becoming a site of violence.)

Beyond oblique casting choices, Subrin understands how biography as a method produces and reproduces rigidly linear narratives. As alluded to, she frequently describes her work as “speculative biography,” a form of reconstitutive art that leaves space for the negative capability of her subjects. Subrin elucidates: “I use that term [speculative] to emphasize the impossibility of biography and to point to the fact that what we’re doing is imagining someone’s life and filling in the crevices and holes.”

One may wonder how Subrin’s desire to revive the archive intersects with and departs from other forms of historical (re)imagining, such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” as articulated in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.” In discussing the ubiquity of Venus—an emblem of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world—in contemporary archives of slavery, Hartman addresses the violent conditions that determine her appearance and dictate her