Elisabeth Subrin: The Listening Takes

“Il destino,” smile melancholically on each of three screens the three actresses portraying Maria Schneider as they reflect on her childhood aspiration of becoming an artist. In Elisabeth Subrin’s The Listening Takes, Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval, three women who have known their own success as artists in the spotlight, infuse the role of Schneider, the feminist hidden behind the quintessential seductress of 20th century film, with the meaning of being a woman today. 

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Award-winning director Elisabeth Subrin aims to untether Schneider from Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, the 1972 film in which she debuted, and in which she performed a non-consensual sex scene opposite co-star Marlon Brando that followed her throughout her long career. Subrin recreates and reimagines the 1983 interview in which Schneider was asked to discuss that role. She manages to reverse the effect of forgetfulness with time passed, the tendency for pity, and the generalization of the deeply personal under a vague and distant category: Hollywood.

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The three actresses that portray Schneider bring to the role their own sensitivity, as well as elements of their own experiences in the film industry, which Subrin has delicately interwoven into each segment of the interview. Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the Brown Arts Institute, writes that the three women embody Schneider “through an intersection of subjectivities,” for Subrin herself has said that "a biographical subject is not temporally or cohesively defined; it moves through the bodies of both those who write it, and those who read it. At its core, a biography is a multiplicity; collectively written and cross-historical." 

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The 30-minute exhibition begins with Manal Issa’s segment of the interview, during which the other two actresses wait for their interview with a pensiveness and exhaustion that sets the tone for the project as a whole. Issa’s performance is followed by the interpretations of Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandova, during both of which, again, the other actresses exist modestly, though they are inevitably seen and admired. It seems that the three women are in continuous conversation with each other, though their performances are undeniably separate, taking place on three screens placed behind each other, so that one woman may never “see” the others. Behind each screen is a grid of mirrors, where viewers may see their reflection and understand that the exhibition’s message, while uniquely Schneider’s, is universal.

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After the third interview, segments from each dialogue are overlapped. One notices the particularly poignant moment in which the three women simultaneously look at the camera, put their hands together, and plead “No” as the interviewer asks to talk about Tango. Before the end of the exhibition, the interviewer asks all three women if they are comfortable on set. Issa and Maïga respond “If I didn’t like it, I’d do something else.” Sandova remains silent, ultimately portraying Schneider, in the words of Subrin, as a “multiplicity,” and leaving the viewer with the complexity of what it means to be a woman in the world Schneider has left behind.