FAMOUS WOMEN

silence. However, “critical fabulation” is a means of working within and against an intentionally incomplete archive, a form of examining and articulating violence to then generate a “narrative of what might have been or could have been.” As such, Hartman’s work is a powerful assertion of subjunctive becoming that clarifies the entanglement of past and present racial violence. Although Subrin, too, “play[s] with and rearrang[es] the basic elements of the story” and “re-present[s] the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view” in an attempt to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done,” her insistence upon the significance of representation rather than the reality of violence marks a departure from Hartman’s methodology. That race is imagined as an additional vulnerability that can be retroactively applied—even if the intent is to expand the terms of marginalization and demonstrate a continuity that extends to the present—contributes to a sense of ‘colorblindness,’ even as race is explicitly invoked.

Interestingly, rather than recontextualize Schneider’s original interview in The Listening Takes, Subrin fractures this moment across time. Mirrors line the back of each screen, such that the actresses are reflected on one another to produce a cumulative effect. In her artist talk, Subrin describes the process of aging glass for the installation to demonstrate a progression through time and resonance across decades with each screen. “You start getting this idea of a collective unconscious—multiple Marias from different time periods speaking across time to each other,” Subrin tells the Indy. With the mirroring, Subrin insists that it is impossible to behold Schneider’s interview outside of its contemporary political context; in this manner the present is continuously cast back, just as history is overdetermined by its interpretation from different vantage points. Schneider’s revitalization on-screen screams the failures of the past, the film industry’s ignorance in the face of sexual violence only punctuated by our distance from both Schneider and any tangible pursuit of liberation.

In this manner, The Listening Takes reenactment multiplies the effects of a film like Shulie, one of Subrin’s earliest works, in which actress Kim Soss recreates a Shulamith Firestone documentary made by four Northwestern students in 1967. Shulie emphasizes the capacity of reenactment to squish the viewer into an uncanny point of view; the film simultaneously begs us to consider the legacy of its subject’s feminism and that feminism’s future. Writing at the time of Shulie’s release in 1997, reviewer Kate Haug considers that reenactment in the film exposes the distance between the seemingly more radical roots of Second Wave feminism and its moderate legacies in the 1980s. New York Times film reviewer Richard Brody echoes Haug’s take when he describes Shulie’s anachronism as a “[graft] of the future onto the past.” With their reflexivity, Subrin’s reenactments expose the deficiencies of progress narratives. Still, it is important to challenge repetition as an equalizing, redemptive force for the violences represented, in The Listening Takes and across Subrin’s oeuvre.

In refusing linear biographies, Subrin often produces novel conclusions about otherwise overlooked histories. One of Subrin’s more recent works, the aforementioned Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, utilizes split-screens to display two scenes of Williamsburg, Brooklyn—one shot on October 13, 2001 and the other seven years later, in 2008. With the latter, Subrin emphasizes differences like a new ornamental aluminum fence, or a soft-serve advert in place of a poster with a target on Osama bin Laden. Her juxtapositions of Williamsburg underscore the nebulous nature of liberal narratives of historical progress, while also calling attention to the nebulous politics of public-facing aesthetics.

It was not until working on her debut feature-length film, A Woman, A Part, question that became the foundation of her blog of the same title. An interest in how women are represented, and the people on both sides of the camera responsible for that representation, underlies all of her work. However, holding The Listening Takes alongside her other projects, one may wonder: what are the tangible effects of this representation? With such attention to the value of images, might we lose sight of the real violence?

Perhaps the installation’s most enduring offering to this question is its attention to sound. Subrin envisions The Listening Takes as an immersive experience—the footage was also released as a single-channel filmic version Maria Schneider, 1983—that impresses upon its audience an embodied sense of what it means to listen. Standing within the black box, one becomes aware that the speakers are directed at separate screens, such that different iterations of Schneider are in conversation with each other, with the actresses playing her, with the audiences, with themselves. This resuscitation of the past and suspension across space and time, ask the listener not only to behold what may be captured on the stage, but also to hear the “collective unconscious” whose silencing haunts Subrin’s work. The ending of The Listening Takes, however, surrenders this polyphonic soundtrack in favor of a single voice.

Traumatized by her experience with Tango and stymied in her career by subsequent cycles of addiction, Maria Schneider recalls how the vision acting in Los Angeles. When working on the screenplay, Subrin tells the Indy, she found herself wondering, who cares about actresses?—a