Maria Schneider, 1983 + Sweet Ruin + Shulie – Encore w/ Elisabeth Subrin

Three epic shorts by award-winning filmmaker (and rad human) Elisabeth Subrin.

Director Elisabeth Subrin in attendance for a Q+A after the screening.

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Maria Schneider, 1983

Elisabeth Subrin (Dir), 25 minutes, France/USA, Western New York Premiere

Arthouse Spotlight + BIFF 2023 Best Experimental Film Award Winner

In French + English w/ English + French subtitles.

In a cross-genre work that bends time, history, and form, three acclaimed actresses (Manal Issa / Aïssa Maïga / Isabel Sandoval) reenact a troubling interview with the iconic French actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011), whose traumatic experience on the set of the legendary Last Tango In Paris only resurfaced after #metoo. As Maria transforms through multiple interpretations, Subrin asks her audience to listen again and to see the similarity and difference in repetition.

Festivals: Cannes Film Festival (Director’s Fortnight) + New York Film Festival

2023 César for Best Documentary Short Film.

Read the interview w/ Director Elisabeth Subrin by B. Ruby Rich here!

Still from Maria Schneider, 1983

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"Sweet Ruin"

Elisabeth Subrin (Dir), 10 minutes, USA, 2008

"Sweet Ruin" is an experimental adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized script, Technically Sweet, written in the late '60s, but never produced. Set in the Amazon and Sardinia, it was to star Jack Nicholson as T., a disillusioned journalist obsessed with guns, and Maria Schneider as "The Girl." In two screens paralleling the dual plots of his script, "Sweet Ruin" imagines the ruins of Antonioni's work, as if it was somehow actually filmed, but then lost and forgotten.

Meditating on love, violence and cinema, the installation was shot with out-of-date, damaged 16mm film stock, processed and edited to evoke fragments of hypothetical lost takes and shards of the abandoned script. Reclaiming and reinterpreting the original script, Subrin explores the psychological and gendered dynamics of relationships by blurring the lines between interiorized and externalized states of being, and casting an actress in both the Nicholson and Schneider role.

Featuring Gaby Hoffman as T. and The Girl

Sound Design by Taylor Thompson

Please note that this is a single-channel version of a two-channel installation.

Still from Sweet Ruin

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"Shulie"

Elisabeth Subrin (Dir), 37 minutes, USA, 1997

"A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, Elisabeth Subrin's "Shulie" uncannily and systemically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and a time out of joint — and in Subrin's words, 'to investigate the mythos and residue of the late 60s.' Staging an extended act of homage, as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism, and author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Reflecting on her life and times, "Shulie" functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film."

—Mark MacElhatten and Gavin Smith, Curators, Views from the Avant Garde, The 36th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, New York

Still from Shulie