PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — Plates clack in the darkened David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. In The Listening Takes, filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin’s three-channel installation, French actress Manal Issa is sitting in a brasserie, recreating a 1983 interview with the late actress Maria Schneider. Every pause, flinch, and cigarette flick is the same, including the pained reaction to a question about Last Tango in Paris, the movie that inflicted a surprise rape scene on Schneider when she was 19 years old.
When Issa finishes, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval each replicate this interview on their own screens, modifying the script slightly to account for their experiences as a Black woman and a trans woman, respectively. Through this repetitive reinterpretation, Subrin forces viewers to witness how cavalierly the assault is addressed — “Can’t you separate your experience from the force of the film?” the interviewer asks — and how the media’s, and by extension the audience’s, desire to indulge in the details of the event perpetuates a subtler violence.
The installation’s arrangement entangles visitors in the conflict. Each screen is housed in a wooden return backed with a mirror. The intermingling of our own reflections with the tight shots of each performer creates a queasy sense of voyeurism, an effect reinforced by the complex soundscape, in which angled speakers situate each Maria in conversation with the others.
Throughout her career, Subrin has expressed a longstanding preoccupation with the way actresses serve as archetypes for how women move through the world; conveying both desires and fears, they simulate circumstances through which audiences can project fantasies or safely confront or heal from personal experiences. In The Listening Takes, we observe the relationship between the observed and the observer in real time; as one Maria talks, the others seem to listen, and when Sandoval concludes, they all begin again together. Viewers keeping an eye on Sandoval throughout this final loop will be rewarded. The most modern iteration, she is gifted with the agency we wish Schneider had in 1983. Condemning the scene for what it was — rape — she walks off the set into a life made lighter by that admission.
Following the show into the space behind Sandoval’s screen to the final mirrors, we see only ourselves. From speakers higher in the room, the real Maria Schneider speaks, unbound and beatific, in spliced dialogue from Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, the movie, as we’ve learned from the show, she felt most represented her.
“People disappear every day,” she says to the other Marias, and to us. “I hope you make it.”
Elisabeth Subrin: The Listening Takes continues at the David Winton Bell Gallery (List Art Building Brown University, 64 College Street, Providence, Rhode Island) through June 4. The exhibition was curated by Kate Kraczon, the gallery’s director of exhibitions and chief curator.
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