To be a Woman is to be an Actress: Elisabeth Subrin at Participant Inc



THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS was released in the US in 1973. A film by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Marlon Brando said to be the greatest actor of his time. The director and actor conspired against the 19-year-old lead actress, Maria Schneider, and manipulated her into a nonconsensual sex scene[1] that was not in the script. Schneider was asked about it in an interview in 1983. The artist Elisabeth Subrin remade this interview into two separate and distinct works: one a short film Maria Schneider, 1983 which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and won a 2023 France’s César for Best Documentary Short, and the other an art installation which was shown at the Bell Gallery at Brown University in 2024 and at Participant, Inc. in 2025.
Both projects start with restaging the 1983 interview with 3 different actresses, Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval. The identities of the actresses—Lebanese French, Black American, and Trans Filipino, respectively—become important as the stories diverge and come together.
In the interview, Schneider was asked “Can’t you separate your experience from the force of the film?” My fellow art viewers in the gallery scoffed when I was there. Let’s just say I never need to see another Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, or Roman Polanski film ever again.
The film is a story, a neat short narrative in three acts, in which the interview gets more complicated as the film progresses. The installation, however, is more complex and involved.
We are witnessing a woman (Subrin) witnessing women (Issa, Maïga, Sandoval) witnessing a woman (Schneider) witnessing herself—her actual self, as opposed to her victimhood or her characters in films.
In an interview in Filmmaker magazine, Subrin spoke about her single-channel short film and the three-screen nine-speaker installations and noted: “how a singular biographical representation of a subject is impossible.”[2] Similarly to Gary Husvit’s film ENO, here the artist gives us multiple versions to reflect and refract multiple truths. The effect is eerie and beautiful. As one wanders through the installation, we see the Marias listening to each other, and since the backs of the screens are covered in resin, a ghostlike image is doubled, so at any moment, there may be five Marias, not just three. Not only listening but glistening. One can sit on a bench and see all three screens at once, or drift in the blackness, surrounded by women and their words.
There is a sense of time travel, of going back and forth through space, one woman’s experience ricocheting through the hearts and experiences of anyone who has been sexually assaulted. It’s a subtle yet blistering take on rape culture, in which the ghost of Maria Schneider seems to be shimmering between the screens, her refusal to be seen as an object is instead an inspiration, especially to younger viewers.
The additional short film, Manal Issa, 2024, further complicates the idea of reperforming and the ideas of representation, the gaze, and the actress as an object.
In the gallery at Participant Inc., opposite her take in The Listening Takes, Issa—a Lebanese French actress known to me from her work in The Swimmers— is seemingly absent in the film that bears her name. All we see is her empty seat, her coffee, her cigarette, an iPhone. But she’s there, in voice, answering the same questions that Schneider did. The Issa film is a mirror, a reflection, a refraction, another type of reperformance, not only can she not separate art from her personal life, but from her public and political life.
I’ve long been a fan of Subrin’s, from her early film Shulie to the 2010 show Her Compulsion to Repeat at the Sue Scott Gallery, to her 2016 drama A Woman, A Part, about a burned-out actress to her 2018 blog, Who Cares About Actresses.
Subrin wrote in 2006, about her film Shulie:
My compulsion to repeat is certainly not groundbreaking. Yet I relate this impulse to an increased, perhaps even perverse, need within my generation to recreate struggles we did not physically experience. Or did we? Why would one repeat, fetishize, or desire a historical moment if there was not an intimate connection if one was not somehow a product of (or participant in) that period? ….Questioning who and what merits historical preservation, and why we crave this history, is what provoked the particular repetitive strategies of this project.

I went to a conversation between Subrin and poet Arianna Rienes at the gallery on January 26th, 2025 where both got deep about being Jewish women artists. Raines spoke of Subrin’s work as “looking at women who are looked at….pointing to the mechanisms of misrepresentation and exploitation.”
They spoke of the spiritual, how the piece feels like a seance, and Subrin talked about the decision for Issa to not be on screen in the new work.
The story was that after Issa came to Subrin and said no, she changed her mind, “the camera was capital”, that she didn’t want to be used by the camera, and Subrin came back with the idea of her absence. Reportedly, Issa replied that Subrin was “the only person I’ve said ‘no’ to who didn’t walk away.”
This dialogue, negotiation, and collaboration between director and actor is somehow evident in the piece, the recognition of understanding and holding one another through the lens, the multiple lenses, of the camera, of the zoom screen Subrin directed through, through the screen we see now. Here is the consent that Schneider wasn’t offered.
As an artist and as a woman who has been sexually assaulted, this hit me hard. How many times had this abandonment after a refusal happened to me? To all the women I know? Most people are so used to women saying yes, to being the agreeable good girls we are taught to be since birth, that when we DO say no, that’s it. It’s one reason why saying “No” is so hard for so many people socialized as women, knowing the abandonment that happens afterward. I teach at The New School, and in my class “What is Rape Culture?” I teach my students to say “No” and to practice saying it so they will have a bodily memory of it, maybe it will be easier to access the words when they need them. We practice saying “No” in a variety of ways, everything from screaming “Get the fuck away from me!” to how to tell a friend you aren’t available to delineating sexual boundaries.
On Sunday night, Subrin reminded us that Susan Sontag wrote in her 1972 essay, The Double Standards of Aging, “To be a woman is to be an actress.”[3]
I’m especially interested in acting and reperformance as I started my performance career as an actor, working mostly in experimental works written and directed by women and later in regional and Off-Broadway plays.[4] My first professional acting job was in high school, and I still perform in the works of other artists like Alix Pearlstein and Laura Parnes. The first reperformance I wanted to stage was Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll. I wrote to her asking to restage it as exactly as I could, gesture for gesture- much like Manal Issa does with Schneider’s interview here. (Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval take their liberties.) Schneemann wrote to me refusing my request for permission and noted that she was a painter, not a performance artist. Later, I thought fuck permission, and did my version of Interior Scroll, with the text about maternal sexuality and patriarchy and childrearing rather than sexism in the art world. I paired it with an endurance piece in which I attempted to destroy childproof furniture. It lasted only about 10 minutes. (Childproof/Cunt, at Grace Exhibition Space, SITEFEST, curated by Chloë Bass, 2011[5]) Later, I reimagined Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervix Announcement as a performance called Feminist Peep Show (2011-2015, various venues, including Glasshouse and The New Museum[6]) showing not only my cervix but also my rectocele[7] and scars from tearing during childbirth while telling the audience of Sprinkle’s genius and educating them on the aftermath of squeezing a baby out of your vagina. I’ve also remade works by Joseph Beuys, Ana Mendieta, and William Pope L. for Clifford Owens. To me, reperformance is a way of getting inside a performance, experiencing what it feels like, putting myself in that artist’s physicality, and discovering what more I might have to offer. And that by doing this work, I am changed, and the work is changed in my somatic sensations.
At one point during the conversation, Reines exclaimed, “It’s so weird, what actresses do. They get possessed!” Yes, we do. Sometimes it’s a connection, sometimes a taking over, an outside-in or an inside-out, a shifting of spirit. I used to make altars to my characters: writing their histories, cutting out photos from vintage magazines, imagining what lipstick they wore, love notes they’d saved from their high school first loves—if they’d had one, I’d scour thrift shops and streets for things the role required of my soul.
Subrin revealed that the day after Manal Issa, 2024 was filmed, 500 people were killed in an Israeli bombing of Beirut. She also confided that one CAN see Issa in the background through the window, in Beirut, walking outside the cafe with her daughter.
In the gallery, we have this unexpected chorus of voices, where the actors all sync up. The experience of being supported by other women, especially in terms of who is allowed to speak and who is listened to, as actresses, creates an atmosphere of magic and possibility. When Sandoval speaks of her rape, we are all listening to trans women. These women listen to each other, offering witness to each other and then we, too, are the witnesses and participants in a transformation. And then, when we know that we see Issa going about her life, we see her freedom in that moment. Freedom to not be seen, to not be gazed upon. An autonomous woman.
Elisabeth Subrin, The Listening Takes / Manal Issa, 2024, is on view at Participant Inc. through February 2, 2025.
- https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/news/bertolucci-interview-last-tango-in-paris-maria-schneider-marlon-brando-a7453836.html ↑
- https://filmmakermagazine.com/128765-elisabeth-subrin-the-listening-takes/ ↑
- https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/08/beauty-lies-sontag.html ↑
- https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/30/theater/theater-review-once-again-that-hulking-creature-remains-nameless.html ↑
- https://bushwickdaily.com/news/178-chloe-bass-so-much-amazing-stuff/ ↑
- https://archive.newmuseum.org/public-programs/2234 ↑
- A type of pelvic floor injury, I wrote about it for The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/dec/28/vaginal-health-post-partum-maternity-rectocele ↑
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Christen Clifford is a mother, interdisciplinary feminist artist, and writer who makes work about autonomy, collective healing and body politics. She has shown work at Panoply Performance Lab, The Momentary/Crystal Bridges, and The Brooklyn Museum. Her limited edition risograph artbook about maternal sexuality, BabyLove, was acquired by the Thomas J Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her studio is at Project for Empty Space in Newark and she teaches at The New School.