The Listening Takes (Photo: Daniel Kukla)

Drawing upon a 1983 interview the actress Maria Schneider gave to the French TV show Cinéma Cinéma, Elisabeth Subrin’s short film Maria Schneider, 1983 premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win in 2023 France’s César award for Best Documentary Short. In Subrin’s film, three actresses — Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval — progressively interpret the text of Schneider’s interview throughout the 25-minute piece, with Issa strictly recreating Schneider’s original answers while Maïga and Sandoval adapt the text to reflect their own experiences in the film business, turning the work into, as I wrote in the intro to a previous article on Subrin, “a dialogue that carries Schneider’s words across generations.”
While shooting Maria Schneider, 1983, Subrin captured additional footage for a companion work that adapts the work’s concerns to the gallery space while allowing a whole new set of meanings to emerge. In The Listening Takes, currently running through February 2 at New York’s PARTICIPANT INC gallery, the three actresses are each given their own hanging video screen, and viewers cross in front, walk behind and amble between them, shifting attention to view the actresses singly or all together. The effect is entirely different as the viewer experiences the actresses all at once, receiving not just their words but the force of their attention as they “listen” to each other’s testimonies before their voices all converge to reach a final choral conclusion. (For the viewer, it’s a journey aided by the masterful sound design, in which the voices naturally fade in and out, repositioning themselves as the viewer moves within the work’s soundscape.)
Accompanying The Listening Takes is a new work by Subrin, Manal Issa, 2024, in which the Lebanese French actress is not a presence but an absence. Like Maria Schneider, 1983, the interview takes place in a cafe — there’s a coffee cup, an iPhone, a cigarette left burning in an ashtray — but Issa’s voice as she answers the same questions asked to Schneider in 1983 comes from somewhere off-camera.
From the press release:
Similar to the sound design of the three-channel installation, which underscores the listener’s attention, with Manal Issa, 2024, Subrin directs us toward deeper listening by referencing the hypothetical interviewer’s questions through pauses in the voiceover, presenting only Manal’s answers. We don’t know who she’s speaking to; she is there, but not there. While Issa (b. 1992) and Schneider have markedly different life experiences, they share an unwavering commitment to their principles, despite consequential sacrifices and public criticism. Displaced from Lebanon multiple times due to war, Issa’s life has been shaped by politics. The reaction to her protests about Palestine on social media and on the red carpet (including at Cannes in 2018) led to her quit acting until there is a ceasefire. If The Listening Takes implicitly refuses to separate art from life, Manal Issa, 2024, pushes this further by refusing to separate life from politics.
To interview Subrin, we asked artist and filmmaker Michelle Handelman, who also makes work for both single-channel and installation viewing. Below, they discuss the origins of the project, the math required to synchronize the three interviews, shooting Manal Issa, 2024 in Beirut just before the bombings there, and how the meanings of Maria Schneider, 1983 expand by virtue of the installation form.  (Disclosure: I produced Subrin’s 2017 feature, A Woman, A Part.) — Scott Macaulay
Handelman: Elisabeth, how did you start your research, and how has your relationship to Maria Schneider and her cultural significance changed since you first began this project?
Subrin: My interest in biographical subjects usually just starts as fascination and a kind of frustration with how the subject has been represented historically. And then I find all these layers and holes: what looking at this person deeply tells us about the world, and about how subjects and voices are marginalized or misrepresented.

I researched Maria [Schneider] for many years for what I planned to be an experimental biopic, but then the pandemic hit, and I couldn’t do more research in France. But earlier I had seen a short French TV interview with her where she critiqued the patriarchal, capitalist nature of the film industry. And she’s coerced into talking about the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, a film in which she was manipulated into a nonconsensual sex scene. Her comments in 1983 had so much prescience and subtext, pre #metoo, that I couldn’t stop thinking about how this is a story that just keeps going. And, how the manipulative nature of the interview mirrors the sexual violence she experienced on set.
Handelman: Because I really wanted to watch your process chronologically, I watched the original interview with Maria Schneider first. Then I watched your single-channel piece, Maria Schneider, 1983. And then I watched the installation, The Listening Takes. In the single channel work, you see one person perform the original interview, followed by another, and then followed by yet another. And while the three actors say slightly different words specific to their own personal experiences and histories, the viewer still has the experience of focusing on one “Maria’ at a time. This linear progression makes each “Maria” occupy a position in the past in relation to others, and lends itself to understanding each performer as first and foremost as an actor because they’re repeating the same lines. But in the installation, with all three performers present and listening to one another while the other one speaks, you feel the personal identities of each performer, as well as the holistic relationship between all of the performers, and how this one story of patriarchal oppression speaks to and for all of us in the audience. We become listeners sharing the burdens that these Marias are revealing to us, and it’s very powerful. Why did you decide to create both a short film and a multi-screen installation for this work, and what was the production process like in shooting both simultaneously?
Subrin: It was instinctual that there should be an installation and a single channel. I had a feeling that there would be things that wouldresonate in different ways between the two. Thesingle channel essentially has a three-act structure, the journey through these three Maria’s. It moves linearly, and the end is a third act reveal and a reckoning, finally, with the trauma that couldn’t be spoken in the first two cycles. The installation has nine speakers and a complex immersive sound design. When you wander through these three screens, listening to one [Maria] speak while two other actresses silently receive what she’s saying, you start feeling like other Marias are inhabiting the Maria that you’re looking at.
I’m obsessed with the idea that history moves forwards and backwards, folding on top of itself, and the three channels articulate my ideas about how a singular biographical representation of a subject is impossible — that Maria is a multiplicity. There’s a feeling of healing through speaking and reception. When Isabel speaks about being raped, she’s not alone. There are two other women listening, receiving. And I think that increases our sense of what we should be doing in response to sexual violence.
Handelman: I’m also a moving image artist, and I do a lot of work with multi-screen installations. I know that a multi-screen installation often has the effect of dividing a viewer’s attention because so much is going on in the room and the viewer has to constantly shift their focus around. But instead of dividing the viewer’s attention, I found that The Listening Takes actually sharpens the viewer’s attention, which I found fascinating. Could you talk about how you directed your performers during the moments when they are not speaking and are just listening? Or, just more about the production process in terms of how you shot each one individually. To sync the three of them as you have, there must have been a lot of math involved.
Subrin: Exactly. I had never shot on a soundstage before, and it really helped. It was just extraordinary to be all quietly clustered around this intimate set in Paris. The whole crew said they felt like they were holding space for the performers. And there was indeed a lot of math involved.  I wanted the three-channel work to feel like chamber music when the three Marias are speaking at the same time, or when they come together and then go off. When they are each doing the script, they go at their own speed and have their own emotions. But I wanted them to be connected at times too, so I chose an important beat — an “anchor beat” — in each of the five shots in the film, and I wanted them all to be on that same beat on the same moment. So we had stopwatches, and we cued from behind the camera.
Handelman: Did you do a lot of rehearsals?

Subrin: A lot of rehearsals for their spoken performances, but not for their seven-minute long takes, that we called “listening takes.’” With the long takes of Aïssa Maïga and Manal Issa, what they’re actually doing on set is listening to the real Maria [Schneider] do the real [French television] interview. And in the case of Isabel Sandoval, because she doesn’t speak French, we recorded Manal performing Maria’s interview in English for Isabel to listen to. Their performances — the ways they receive Maria, listen to Maria — are just so different. In the film and installation, I’m working with them on three registers: them as actresses playing Maria Schneider, a character who’s also an actress; their feelings about Maria’s experiences in this original interview; and then their own feelings about the subject matter. So, in rehearsals, I wanted to learn as much as I could about them so that I had that toolkit. For example, Aïssa had a very intense level of empathy for what Maria went through, and there were certain moments where I wanted to pull her, Aïssa, closer to the lens. In a way, I was giving them a complicated direction: “I want you to perform Maria but infuse it with yourself.” That’s very nuanced and slightly abstract, but they all did it beautifully.
Handelman: In the single channel version, we have three cycles. Now in The Listening Takes we have four cycles, and the fourth cycle is what you were describing as being like chamber music, where we actually hear all three performers at once, simultaneously performing the interview. Why did you choose to do this for the installation specifically? You could have done that in the short film as well.
Subrin: I guess the operative words are “insist” and “experience attunement.” I was insisting that we really be with each performer through their own interviewing, inhabiting what they were going through. To have to live with that interview three times. The particular shifts of each of their reactions, their tone, their attitudes and their responses to each of the interviewer’s questions are subtle. They change in affect, language, performance style, even translation (as well as color, sound design, subtitles, etc.). If we just [initially] saw all three of them [at the same time], we’d be excited by the phenomenon: “Look at how these are synced together!” It would be decorative, in a way. If you’ve had to saturate yourself in thesethree distinct performances, when they come back together, I think it just becomes a much more powerful experience.
When you hear them all together, even though there are only three speaking, it feels like a chorus, like many women speaking. It feels so forceful to see these three different actresses having this experience at the same time. My hope was that you would feel even more powerfully a kind of collectivity and a resistance, almost a pushback that an individual person [can give to the system]. Like, I’m thinking about Gisèle Pelicot and her trial in France right now. One of the things she noted was how alone she was at first, and then these crowds of women were circling the courthouse every day in support of her and saying, “You’re not alone.” You could see how her affect and strength was supported by having the power of all these voices together. One of the struggles women have talking about sexual violence is that it’s usually them alone having to “prove” their experience in front of other people. And this time they were doing it all together. So it feels like a very different register. And to me, both were important.
Handelman: The other piece that you have at Participant, Inc right now is Manal Issa, 2024, which the press release describes as a fourth reenactment. Could you talk a little bit about what this piece is, how you see it as a reenactment and how you worked with Manal scripting it?
Subrin: The piece began as I was planning for this show at Participant Inc over a year ago. Manal and I stayed in touch after Maria Schneider, 1983, and after the horror began in Gaza and Israel, we started talking a lot. It was a way to kind of metabolize, to quote Arianna Reines, what was going on. Manal’s family has historically been displaced multiple times from Lebanon, and she has been politically invested in Palestine for a long time. I kept wanting to send her Instagram posts and articles to show her that there was political resistance in the United States. Processing together felt meaningful, in this tiny little way— bridging this devastation as a Shia Muslim Lebanese French person and as a Jewish American 5,200 miles apart. I was having questions about showing Maria during those first months given the film is partially dependent on Manal’s extraordinary performance, and the real Manal was so devastated by the war. I asked her if she wanted to write something that I could read to audiences, and she said she was too upset, but she’d record me voice messages and I could do whatever I wanted. So I transcribed them and edited them, sent them back to her, and we distilled them into a statement that I read at the beginning of screenings. And that process initiated a really meaningful way of collaborating long distance.
I was trying to find a way to bridge the Maria Schneider project and the devastating crisis in the Middle East, which seemed virtually impossible. And then I just had this idea. Manal was the only one of the three actors who didn’t get to adjust her reenactment according to her own perspective. The other two got to go in and think about what they would change if they as themselves had been interviewed. So, I proposed to Manal that she reenact the same interview, responding to the same questions but from her own perspective in 2024. Manal is brilliant, so we had epic Zooms, text threads, voice messages, breaking down the film’s questions, and thisturned into hours of essentially documentary interviews that expanded to her whole life. And then over months, we just kept distilling it into a script.

I was going to go to shoot it with her in Beirut but the timing was obviously complicated. And then late last spring, Manal said, “I don’t want to do this because I don’t want to be on camera right now.” So, I proposed [the concept of Manal Issa 2024] to her, and that’s how we wound up with a missing Manal. It’s such a miracle we did that that because her choice not to be on camera is haunting and holds the whole space. We’re so aware of her absence and presence.
Handelman: Manal’s words as well as her delivery are incredibly powerful. It’s quitemoving and, actually, incredibly visceral even though there’s no camera movement, until the very end. It’s a testament to the power of words and cadence.
Subrin: I think it’s also a testament to rigorous looking. Like I told the cinematographer, Bassem Fayad, when we first met, ”You’re going to feel crazy because we are just [shooting] objects moving around a table.” But there was an incredible amount of study and preparation. References like Stalker, Jeanne Dielman, and still lifes where the level of rendering and light makes it something you want to look at forever. For the color grading I did not want to go down the road of Westernized Middle Eastern film cliches, like the desert golden wash, or the blue/gray war palette. I wanted something that was beautiful and rich but also not like product placement, not like a Super Bowl ad.
Handelman: That’s something that Manal talks about in the film, her desire not to be on screen and to figure out what is true in this moment in time — breaking down the artifice of acting and filmmaking when you’re faced with murder, carnage and war all around you. I have to bring up that chilling moment in the film, when we see the water glass shake on the table and we hear the sonic boom, while Manal speaks about how there’s always a boom before the bombing starts. The day after you shot this the actual bombing of Lebanon by Israel began. Can you talk about that moment on set? Were you directing it remotely? How big was your crew then?  What happened when that sonic boom went off and how did you regroup? I’m assuming Manal’s voiceover was recorded at a different time.
Subrin: Yes, it was recorded separately. Although we did it twice, one time in the sound studio and one time on location there and ended some of both. But to answer the first question, the sonic boom is scripted. We were essentially reenacting it, meaning that the sound is inserted, and the shake of water is fake. But daily there are sonic booms, so we were staging a sonic boom that could have happened during the shoot, and that was harrowing. I’d been on lots of Zoom meetings with Manal, Bassem Fayad, the producer, Lara Abou-Saifan, the cinematographer, and the sound recordist, Victor Besse, who were all in Beirut, where they’d be like, “Did you hear that? Hold on, we just need to go to the window and check that.”
I was directing remotely from Brooklyn with a live feed from the camera, my editor Jenn Ruff was also on the Zoom, and the crew was on location in a cafe on Hamra Street in Beirut. But even directing from afar, the sonic boom reenactment was so disturbing – asking a Lebanese crew to recreate an experience they were living in the moment. I mean, even putting a cell phone on the table a few days after the pager explosions and bombing in Dahiyeh was intense. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Everybody was holding in a lot of emotion.
All the light patterns on the table are completely constructed and controlled by a remote so that when the sunlight in the window got brighter, the shadows were adjusted. And Manal sat there between takes, rearranging the objects with us, taking a sip of coffee, smoking the cigarette, etc. I thought that Maria Schneider, 1983 was the simplest film I ever made, which was wrong. Manal Issa, 2024 was even simpler, like we’re doing a shoot that’s a reenactment of a table. But the smaller you make something, the more focused, the more meaningful and precise everything has to become. Which ashtrays? What are the reflections in the glass? How [burned] is the cigarette? Where is the smoke going? How are the shadowschanging? Where should the phone be? Suddenly there’s a lot of meaning on that table. It was very intimate and intense and humbling to be recreating something that all of them there were viscerally experiencing every day. And anytime we said cut, of course everybody would be checking their phones to see what was actually happening [outside].

Michelle Handelman is a New York-based award-winning filmmaker, visual artist, and writer. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, along with awards from Creative Capital, NYSCA, NYFA and Art Matters. Her 1995 feature film BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism is part of the New Queer Cinema movement.