Elisabeth Subrin first saw Shulie five years ago when she was doing research for a movie at Kartemquin Films. The half-hour documentary, shot in 1967 by four male Northwestern University students–including Kartemquin’s Jerry Blumenthal–follows 22-year-old Shulamith Firestone, then a student at the School of the Art Institute wrestling with her nascent feminist identity. Two years after the film was completed, she wrote the best-selling feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
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Subrin, who had heard of Firestone but hadn’t read her book, became obsessed with the portrait, in which Firestone bemoans society’s “fertility deal hang-ups” and talks about how it’s hard to carry on relationships with men because they don’t take women’s work seriously. She calls her bosses at her part-time post office job “petty little bastards” and her relationship with her African-American coworkers akin to “being in jail together.” The most uncomfortable scene shows Firestone defending her paintings to an all-male review board at SAIC.
A few changes were deliberate, like adding an opening montage of Chicago and putting a Starbucks coffee cup in a postal worker’s hand. She also substituted a demonstration at the 1996 Democratic National Convention for a 1960s be-in. “At the convention, all of the 1960s politics were in people’s fashions and on their T-shirts, although I didn’t see much politics going on,” says Subrin. “I’m not sure if the scene is hopeful or ironic.”
