MEMOIRS OF A DIFFICULT DAUGHTER: WORKS BY ELISABETH SUBRIN
AT AURORA PICTURE SHOW
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 8PM & SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 6PM*
ELISABETH SUBRIN IN PERSON
Aurora Picture Show is pleased to host Elisabeth Subrin with a presentation of three short video works. Subrin will also be premiering a video she recently completed for the band Le Tigre.
Elisabeth Subrin is a film/video director, writer and educator. Her most recent projects examine intersections of history and subjectivity within female biography. Engaging conventions of documentary and personal narrative, her works strategically undermine their own forms, shifting historical periods, genres and identifications to explore the residual impact of feminism and the hazy boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Her award-winning films and videos have broadcast and screened widely in the United States and abroad, including at the New York Film Festival, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the American Film Institute, Pacific Film Archives and festivals worldwide. --Video Data Bank.
Featuring
Shulie, 1997, 36 minutes
"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 1960s.” 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 35th New York Film Festival
“It’s a fascinating tape. Not a clone in the end, but a brilliant rethinking of history...Subrin has created a document within a document that makes us remember what we didn't know, then makes us realize all over again how much we've lost. Subrin turns the past into an amusement park attraction for the present, strapping us playfully into our seats, and in the process gives us a glimpse of the video of the future...” —B. Ruby Rich, San Francisco Bay Guardian
Premiered at 1998 International Film Festival Rotterdam and the 35th New York Film Festival 2000 Whitney Biennial.
Swallow, 1995, 28 minutes
Based on accounts of girlhood anorexia, "Swallow" unravels the masked and shifting symptoms that define clinical depression. With a densely layered soundtrack, humorous and painful scenes of potential psychological breakdown reveal a critical loss of meaning, and the failure of symptoms to detect mental illness. Weaving narrative, documentary and experimental strategies, "Swallow" intimately traces the awkward steps from unacknowledged depression to self-recognition.--Video Data Bank
The Fancy, 2000, 36 minutes
"The Fancy" is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) as evoked in the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.--Video Data Bank
"Continuing her exploration of experimental biographical forms, the maker of "Swallow" and "Shulie" turns her critical gaze to the life and art of a renowned young female photographer whose early death left behind a controversial body of work rife with psychosexual implication. Rigorously structural in form, this speculative bringing-to-light meticulously sifts physical evidence and sketchy facts in an attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the photographer's pictures." —Gavin Smith, Editor, Film Comment
