Shulie
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
The decision by Elisabeth Subrin and Jill Godmilow, two intelligent and resourceful academics, to remake little-known 60s political documentaries can neither be identified with the Hollywood remake syndrome nor entirely disentangled from it. It seems to me that they and Hollywood are responding to the same cultural and political block–an inability to come up with new thoughts about the present–but I don’t believe they’re responding in the same way or for the same reasons. After all, it isn’t as if they’re remaking classics of the avant-garde like Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, or Scorpio Rising. On the contrary, they’re calling attention to buried works most of us wouldn’t have a clue about if it weren’t for their films.
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At the Rotterdam film festival this year I saw both Godmilow’s film and Subrin’s video. At that time Shulie concluded with the disclaimer “This is a work of fiction,” which has since been removed. There’s no question that remaking a fiction film like Farocki’s–even if the fiction has a didactic, documentary function–is radically different from remaking a documentary like the 1967 Shulie. I think it could even be argued that Godmilow’s work turns a fiction film into a documentary and Subrin’s work turns a documentary into a fictional video. Both works attempt in their different fashions to collapse the 60s into the 90s and vice versa, and in this endeavor Shulie may fail more profoundly simply because there’s a world of difference between a 22-year-old woman speaking for and about herself and an actress speaking the 22-year-old’s words. It’s not a commentary on Soss’s skill as an actress that her manner of speaking is colorless and more guarded than Firestone’s and that she conveys a certain emotional vacancy. But it’s difficult to pinpoint how much this is a matter of the differences in everyday speech and body language now and 30 years ago and how much this is a matter of existential authenticity. Subrin’s uncanny precision in fanatically duplicating some of the awkward camera angles and ragged cuts of the original ultimately reinforces our sense that the past can only be imitated. (Subrin describes Soss’s performance as an “interpretation” rather than an attempt at duplication, but this in no way prevents Soss’s behavioral tics from reeking of the 90s.)
I have to confess that I prefer Subrin’s Shulie to the film it remakes, if only because the complex historical pathos produced by her efforts yields far more information about the 90s than the original film could possibly tell us about the 60s, then or now. However, I prefer Inextinguishable Fire to What Farocki Taught, because the political motivations of the former are more direct and lucid. My preferences have very little to do with the technical skill or resourcefulness of either Subrin or Godmilow, but they have a great deal to do with assessing the value of a political work in its own time.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
