NEW YORK, NY – The Jewish Museum will present Shulie: A Film by Elisabeth Subrin from September 12, 2010 through January 30, 2011 in the Museum’s Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center. Shulie (1997) is a shot-by-shot remake of a little-known documentary about 1960s feminist Shulamith Firestone. Author of the treatise The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Firestone was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967 when four male directors selected her as a subject for a film about the so-called Now Generation. Shot in the style of direct cinema, the original Shulie featured Firestone discussing religion, the limitations of motherhood, and racial and class issues in the workplace. Thirty years later, Elisabeth Subrin recreated Shulie using actors in many of the original locations. The resulting film is a nostalgic and somewhat cynical reflection on the legacy of second-wave feminism. Subrin writes, “in the compulsion to remake, to produce a fake document, to repeat a specific experience I never actually had, what I have offered up is the performance of a resonant, repetitive, emotional trauma that has yet to be healed.” The exhibition also includes four new digital photographs of enlarged film stills from Shulie, two of which will be shown for the first time. Shulie is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism.
Elisabeth Subrin’s award-winning work has screened widely in the US and abroad, including in solo shows at P.S.1, The Museum of Modern Art, The Vienna International Film Festival, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Harvard Film Archives and The San Francisco Cinematheque; and in group shows and festivals at The Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The New York Film Festival, and The Rotterdam International Film Festival. She has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Annenberg, and The Creative Capital Foundations, and participated in the Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Fellowships with her first feature-length narrative film, in development with Forensic Films in New York. She has received film commissions from The MacDowell Colony and The Danish Arts Council for recent projects, The Caretakers and Sweet Ruin. A solo exhibition curated by Lia Gangitano will take place at PARTICIPANT, INC. in New York in 2011. She is currently Assistant Professor of Film and Media Art at Temple University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Located on the third floor of The Jewish Museum, the Goodkind Media Center houses a digital library of radio and television programs from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). It also features a changing exhibition space dedicated to video and new media. Using computer workstations, visitors are able to search material by keyword and by categories such as art, comedy, drama, news, music, kids, Israel, and the Holocaust.
Media programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
About the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting
The National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, founded in 1981 in association with the Charles H. Revson Foundation, is the largest and most comprehensive body of broadcast materials on 20th century Jewish culture in the United States. With a mission to collect, preserve and exhibit television and radio programs related to the Jewish experience, the NJAB is an important educational resource for critical examination of how Jews have been portrayed and portray themselves, and how the mass media has addressed issues of ethnicity and diversity. Its collection is comprised of 4,300 broadcast and cable television and radio programs.
About The Jewish Museum
Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent United States institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture. The Jewish Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains an important collection of 26,000 objects—paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media.
General Information
Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays. For general information on The Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum’s Web site at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212.423.3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.
