Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2022) (Patreon)

Elisabeth Subrin is a filmmaker who uses her art to make interventions into feminist theory. This was the challenge that Laura Mulvey posed in the early 70s when she wrote "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," that only a new form of filmmaking could avoid the misogynist pitfalls of classic Hollywood. Subrin's work in this area is, to my mind, more successful that Mulvey's work with Peter Wollen, in part because Subrin has taken an experimental documentary approach that performs critical labor directly upon various artifacts and histories relevant to the place of women in society. Her film Shulie (1997) remade a short film about a young art student, Shulamith Firestone, who would go on to write The Dialectic of Sex. The Fancy (2000) was a speculative biography of the late photographer / video artist Francesca Woodman.

Her latest film represents another outgrowth of this critical program. Taking as its basis a 1983 interview that Maria Schneider did for French television, Maria Schneider, 1983 finds Subrin meticulously reproducing the interview, examining it as a document of women's position with the film industry. In the interview, Schneider is asked about her work in the cinema, whether she has encountered "actors who are myths," and eventually the subject the interviewers have clearly wanted to broach all along: her work with Bertolucci and Brando on Last Tango in Paris.

Schneider pleads with the film crew not to show any clips from Last Tango, claiming that the film has been an albatross she'd rather forget. (She repeatedly remarks that she'd be happy to discuss her work in Antonioni's The Passenger, apparently a much more positive experience.) Schneider and Subrin use Last Tango as an illustration of the way a male-dominated industry can alienate a woman artist from her sense of self. 

We see the interview performed three times. The first performer is Manal Issa, a young woman who closely resembles Schneider. The second iteration features French-Senegalese actress Aïssa Maïga; the third sequence is performed by Filipino-American director / actress Isabel Sandoval. While there are minor adjustments in the script (particularly in the Sandoval section, since the French dialogue is translated into English), the majority of the material remains the same. However, Schneider's original assertions (spoken by Issa) about women being marginalized in the film industry are amended each time, with Maïga remarking on the challenge of being a Black woman, and Sandoval commenting that she has been typecast because she's a trans woman.

So Subrin intervenes in the original Schneider statements, making them more intersectional as the film progresses. But this doesn't come across as a corrective. Instead, Maria Schneider, 1983 implies that Schneider's words describe a shared experience that is differently inflected based on a woman's subject position, differences that feminism has become more attuned to in the year's since 1983. Still, at the heart of Subrin's film is our awareness, and Schneider's, that the actress suffered trauma, if not outright abuse, at the hands of her director and co-star. This is particularly relevant since, unsurprisingly, the film establishment has a deep investment in downplaying or rejecting Schneider's claims. (For a particularly virulent, anti-feminist example of this rhetoric, I give you Armond White.) 

It was just a strange coincidence that I watched Subrin's film (which premiered last month in the Quinzaine) a few days ago. In that time, two of the stars of Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, Mania Akbari and Amina Maher, have claimed that the director stole original material shot by Akbari, and subjected both of them to emotional abuse both during the filming and during the film's festival run. Interestingly enough, so far we are not seeing many critics or programmers circling the wagons around the legendary director. Whether this reflects some evolution in film culture's sensitivity to filmmakers' abuse of power, or is just a subtle form of racism ("Bertolucci and Polanski are innocent, but we should've expected this from a Muslim man"), remains to be seen.