Ocean State Today

Not long ago, filmmaker and artist Elisabeth Subrin watched a 1983 interview with the late French actress Maria Schneider and became transfixed.The conversation, ostensibly meant to cover Schneider’s film career up to that point, took an unexpected turn when the interviewer asked her about the controversial film “Last Tango in Paris.” Schneider refused to comment: In 1972, the then-19-year-old, co-starring alongside a 48-year-old Marlon Brando, had unwillingly filmed an unscripted rape scene for the movie that traumatized and haunted her for the rest of her life. Instead, she launched into a stunning, prescient meditation on power imbalances and sexism in the film industry and beyond. That interview inspired Subrin to create “The Listening Takes” — a brand new immersive sound, video and sculptural installation coming to Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery on Thursday, Feb. 9. In the installation, three award-winning women in film — Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval — play Schneider in three separate reenactments of that 40-year-old interview. While Issa’s reenactment remains faithful to Schneider’s tone and words, Maïga and Sandoval subtly change their answers and body language to reflect changes in the ways actresses have spoken about consent and power over the decades. The installation, said Brown Arts Institute Director of Exhibitions and Bell Gallery Chief Curator Kate Kraczon, is a powerful exposé of the film industry’s — and many other industries’ — tendency to silence people, most often women, who speak candidly about their experiences with sexism and sexual assault in the workplace.“Maria Schneider was voicing her experiences with uneven and gendered power dynamics in the film industry decades before the #MeToo movement began,” Kraczon said. “Elisabeth Subrin’s project untethers Schneider from ‘Tango’ and allows the nuances of her interview to be reimagined within three extraordinary performances.”

“ ...[S]he was depressed about the film industry and was pushed to talk about ‘Tango’ in this uncomfortable way… The more I watched it, the more I saw that there was so much going on underneath the surface. ”ELISABETH SUBRIN  filmmaker and artistAn immersive experienceThough a single-channel version of the reenacted interviews has already been screened at the Cannes and New York film festivals, among others  — and was recently nominated for a prestigious César Award in France — Kraczon said this is the first time the public will see the interviews presented in an interactive, immersive way. At the center of the Bell Gallery exhibition are three large walls, onto which Subrin has projected each of the three actresses’ performances. The first wall shows Issa, who speaks, behaves and dresses exactly like Schneider in her 1983 interview; the footage of Issa is processed and color-graded to mimic the grainy, analog appearance of the original television segment. The second wall shows Maïga, whose answers are slightly less evasive and more confrontational than Issa’s, and whose reenactment is color-graded to signify a more contemporary era. Then, on the third wall, Sandoval answers the interviewer’s questions forthrightly and in contemporary parlance — even using the word “rape” to describe what happened with Brando on the “Tango” set. The sound design and subtitling reflect a subtle trajectory from past to present. (All interviews allude to, but do not describe, a sexual assault.)Kraczon said visitors will first see each actress speak separately as the other two listen, quietly and emotionally absorbing each other’s testimonies. Then, visitors will have the opportunity to watch and listen to all three interviews simultaneously, experiencing a cross-historical, immersive layering of voices and experiences. Finally, the walls will fade to black, and visitors will hear a 2-minute sound piece that includes some of Schneider’s dialogue from “The Passenger” — a 1975 film the actress often spoke of as the performance “truest to herself.”“Watching these women holding space and listening to each other is powerful — listening and being listened to is a significant step in acknowledging and processing trauma,” Kraczon said. On the other side of the three projected interviews are large walls of mirrors, which allow visitors to see themselves and the reenacted interviews simultaneously. The mirrors behind Issa and Maïga are aged around the edges to suggest the passage of time, while the mirrors behind Sandoval look brand new. The mirrors are intended, Kraczon said, to provoke thoughts about how archives often constrain and distort conversations about figures like Schneider — and to encourage people to consider their own roles in perpetuating women’s trauma. “Elisabeth presents the archive as a fractured, unreliable source,” Kraczon said, “and uses reenactment and repetition as tools to unravel the dominant narratives that have calcified around these women.” Throughout the gallery, 12 separate speaker channels allow visitors to listen to the actresses’ interviews from several different vantage points, offering an immersive experience they can’t get by watching Subrin’s single-channel film in a theater.Rather than exclusively bringing existing works into the Bell Gallery, we are producing major new projects that shape the dialogue around pressing social issues and contemporary artistic practice.KATE KRACZON  Brown Arts Institute Director of Exhibitions and Bell Gallery Chief Curator Subrin said her interest in creating a film about Schneider’s life and career grew while she was working on “A Woman, A Part,” another film project that focuses on a burned-out actress who wants to escape sexism in Hollywood. As she sought funding for the project, Subrin received disparaging remarks — and in response, she started a blog called Who Cares About Actresses? and dedicated it to Schneider. In a recent interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Subrin said that while watching Schneider’s 1983 interview, “I felt there was something there that was bizarre, something besides the obvious things, which is that she was depressed about the film industry and was pushed to talk about ‘Tango’ in this uncomfortable way… The more I watched it, the more I saw that there was so much going on underneath the surface.”In selecting actresses to play Schneider, Subrin purposely chose women who have famously spoken up about pressing global issues. Issa, a French Lebanese actress who most recently starred in Netflix’s “The Swimmers,” once drew attention on the red carpet to a recent Israeli attack in Gaza. At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the Senegal-born Maïga took part in a public protest against racism in the French film industry, calling it out again two years later at the César Awards. And Sandoval, who is transgender and an internationally acclaimed writer and director, has repeatedly spoken about the limitations of trans representation in contemporary cinema and recent violence against Asian Americans.A new vision for the Bell GalleryKraczon said “The Listening Takes” marks the culmination of her nearly 15-year relationship with Subrin, a New England native who refuses to stay within conventional artistic boundaries. Kraczon worked with the Brown Arts Institute to fund a portion of Subrin’s project so that members of the Brown and Providence communities could be the first to experience it.“Rather than exclusively bringing existing works into the Bell Gallery, we are producing major new projects that shape the dialogue around pressing social issues and contemporary artistic practice,” Kraczon said. “The Listening Takes” opens on Thursday, Feb. 9, at the David Winton Bell Gallery, located at 64 College St. in Providence, and runs through Sunday, June 4. An opening reception and conversation with Subrin will take place on Feb. 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bell Gallery. More information is available on the gallery’s website. 

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