Shulie
1997
Super 8 / 16mm, 37:00
"A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, Elisabeth Subrin's Shulie uncannily and systemically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and a time out of joint—and in Subrin's words, 'to investigate the mythos and residue of the late 60s.' Staging an extended act of homage, as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student, who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism, and author of the radical 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Reflecting on her life and times, Shulie functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film."
—Mark MacElhatten and Gavin Smith, Curators, Views from the Avant Garde, The 36th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, New York
"Although Firestone is the nominal subject of Shulie, over the course of the film it becomes clear that what Subrin is really after are questions of gender, documentary truth, historical memory and how those terms twine, and sometimes, knot together... In her witty, generous fashion, Subrin not only recreates a lost moment in Shulie, she gives it new context, even as she boldy takes on that familiar and confounding question, What is cinema?"
—Manohla Dargis, LA Film Critics Association 1998 Achievement Awards
Selected screenings and exhibitions:
Shulie: Film and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin, The Jewish Museum, NY
VOLTA NY 2011, New York, NY
The 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The New York Film Festival, New York, NY
Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Cinema Cavern, PS1, Long Island City, NY
American Tableaux: Selections from the Permanent Collection (touring exhibition), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN;
The Cool World: Film and Video in American 1950-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Awards:
1998 Los Angeles Film Critics' Award for Best Experimental/Independent Film, Los Angeles, CA
Best Experimental Film, 2000, New England Film and Video Festival, Boston, MA
2012, British Film Institute, Sight&Sound International Critics Poll, "The Greatest Films of All Time"