Maria Schneider, 1983

Followed by a conversation between Elisabeth Subrin and Isabel Sandoval.

Actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval recreate a 1983 French TV interview with Maria Schneider, which takes a turn when she’s asked about the traumatic filming of Last Tango in Paris with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando a decade before. Taken together, they not only perform Schneider’s words and gestures, but inhabit them through their own identities—along with all those silenced, before and after. (Elisabeth Subrin, France, 2022, 24 min.) In French with English subtitles

Screening with:

The Fancy

The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958–1981), evoked by the published catalogs of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogs, in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property. (Elisabeth Subrin, USA, 2000, 35 min.)

Sweet Ruin

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 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Meditating on love, violence and cinema, the installation was shot with out-of-date, damaged 16mm film stock, processed and edited to evoke fragments of hypothetical lost takes and shards of the abandoned script.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. (Elisabeth Subrin, USA, 2008, 11 min.) In English and French with English subtitles

Elisabeth Subrin is an award-winning director and artist who creates works in film, video, photography, and installation. Her critically acclaimed projects explore intersections between cultural history and subjectivity through a feminist lens. Known for her use of re-enactment, Subrin’s previous short films, video art, and installations have screened and exhibited widely in the US and abroad, including at Cannes, Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Vienna Viennale, The Whitney Biennial, and film festivals globally. A Sundance Fellow, Subrin’s 2016 award-winning feature narrative, A Woman, A Part, had its world premiere in competition at The Rotterdam International Film Festival and traveled to festivals throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. It was released theatrically in 2017. A retrospective of her work as an artist was mounted at the Sue Scott Gallery in New York and portions traveled to MoMA/PS1’s Greater New York; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; La Musée D’Art Contemporain de Val De Marne, Paris; The Haggerty Museum, Milwaukee; and in a solo exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York. Her new film, Maria Schneider, 1983, had its world premiere at The 75th Cannes International Film Festival and its North American premiere at The New York Film Festival. Her new installation, The Listening Takes, is currently on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University through June 4th, 2023. 

Director, actress, writer, producer, and editor Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker who made history with Lingua Franca at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival, which was nominated for the 2021 Film Independent John Cassavetes Spirit Award. Isabel was the 21st commission of the acclaimed short-film series Miu Miu Women’s Tales with her short, Shangri-La, which was directed, acted, written, and edited by Sandoval. Sandoval has most recently directed the penultimate episode of the Emmy-nominated FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven, based on the book by Jon Krakauer. Sandoval made her directorial debut with the noir-inflected Señorita, which world-premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival and earned her the Emerging Director Award at the Asian American International Film Festival. Her second feature as director was the Ferdinand Marcos-era nun drama Apparition, which won the Lotus Audience Award at the Deauville Asian Film Festival following its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival.

Co-presented with The Department of Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College and the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts, Temple University