There are few traces of Firestone’s future act. Thirty years later, Subrin retraces this portrait shot-for-shot, revisiting its locations in downtown Chicago, the post-office where Firestone works, and seminar rooms where educational critiques take place; re-staging the interviews and conversations captured and discrimination witnessed. In this layering of the past, 1967 in 1997, and in re-presenting this film Subrin addresses the legacy of the past within the present moment. Have we changed, has progress been made, and if so to what extent?

As Subrin has written; “in the compulsion to remake, to produce a fake document, to repeat a specific experience I never actually had, what I have offered up is the performance of a resonant, repetitive, emotional trauma that has yet to be healed.” This questioning of the present recalls the opening quote in the film taken from The Dialectic of Sex “No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper.”

Elisabeth Subrin Shulie 1997 Colour Video Duration: 36 mins 38 secs

Elisabeth Subrin is a filmmaker, artist and writer, producing both narrative films and works in video, photography and installation. Her award-winning work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and film festivals throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The New York Film Festival and international film festivals. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions including at The Jewish Museum, New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, VOLTA New York, Film Society of Lincoln Center and in a mid-career retrospective at Sue Scott Gallery in New York. Her award-winning feature narrative, A Woman, A Part, starring Maggie Siff, was theatrically released in 2017. She is associate professor of film and media arts at Temple University, Philadelphia and was 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar at at École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy, part of CY Cergy Paris Université.

Review | “Elisabeth Subrin,” by Kirstin M. Jones, Frieze, June 2011.

Feature | ‘Recreating a Feminist Visionary,” by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, April 10 2015.

Special thanks to Elisabeth Subrin and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: Elisabeth Subrin, Still, Kim Soss in Shulie, 1997. Courtesy of the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Online | Elisabeth Subrin in conversation with Georgina Jackson, Monday 26 April from 6:30 pm

As part of this screening we are delighted to present a talk by Elisabeth Subrin in conversation with Dr Georgina Jackson. The conversation will delve into the making of Shulie as well as giving an insight into Subrin’s forthcoming film and book project about the late French actress Maria Schneider in light of the global #MeToo movement.

The talk will be presented on the Gallery’s YouTube channel.