On Listening, Talking, and Silence

Abstract

Elisabeth Subrin’s Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022) and Pratibha Parmar’s My Name Is Andrea (2022) both use reenactment to reflect on their subjects (Maria Schneider and Andrea Dworkin), women whose artistic and political lives were highjacked by sexual assault. Subrin and Parmar deploy performance in unconventional ways, casting multiple actresses from diverse backgrounds, experimenting with temporal layering, and drawing on unconventional audiovisual archives. There is a core tension, in both projects, between the particularities of embodied experience and the pervasive narratives of violence, trauma, and misogyny that repeat across time. Yet these works use reenactment to reach markedly different conclusions about identity, history, and artistic praxis. Equally striking are the interventions each film makes into feminist history, fashioning explicit and distinct connections between the legacies of the women they depict and a fractious political present.