Part of Winter 1999
An east coast American film and video artist, writer and educator, Elisabeth Subrin has been internationally acclaimed for her subversive stories about dames and their doppelgangers. These transgressive bio-pics teleport through time, channel surf between narrators, and haze the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.
Swallow (1995) is an evocative collage about a young girl, caught in the throws of anorexia and depression, deviance and disintegration. Shot in a variety of formats, from pixelvision to 35mm, it sucks the guts out of fairy tale notions of sugar’n’spice and dissolves the myths of what it means to be a girl today (hear the music of PJ Harvey in the spacious, low voltage soundscape).
Shulie (1997) is a sly, faux-documentary which recreates – shot by shot – an obscure film made in 1967: a docu-portrait of Chicago art student Shulamith Firestone, who later published a ground-breaking feminist text. Complete with a movie marquee advertising Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, this reconstruction cleverly corrodes notions of historical progress.
Bio:
Elisabeth Subrin is a film/video artist and writer. Her award-winning
works explore intersections in history and female subjectivity, and have
screened widely in North America and Europe, including at the New
York Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Subrin has presented her work in one-woman shows at San Francisco
Cinematheque, Film Forum in Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Film Center at The Art Institute of Chicago and next week, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Shulie recently received a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Independent/Experimental Film/Video. Subrin teaches at The Five Colleges in western Massachusetts.
