Meet Marlon Brando & Maria Schneider, 1983

Programme

• Meet Marlon Brando (Albert Maysles & David Maysles, US 1966, 28')

  In an interview session with various regional TV journalists, the famed movie actor Marlon Brando shows his most charming, and most reticent, side. Instead of answering questions about his latest film, the ever-amiable Brando distracts one inexperienced reporter overcome by blind reverence after another, or discomfits them with compliments such as, “I believe I have never been interviewed by such a beautiful woman before.”
  
  Without saying so out loud, the Maysles brothers demonstrate how the actor has been turned into a marketable product, and how he resists this. At the same time, their film calls into question the interview phenomenon, so strongly detested in the Direct Cinema genre that they helped pioneer.

• Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, FR 2022, 26')

  The 1983 French television interview with actor Maria Schneider has lost little of its relevance in the intervening 40 years. Schneider talks about abusive practices in the film industry and the vulnerable position of female actors in it. Though she doesn’t name it specifically, it is clear that one of the events she refers to is her traumatic experience on the set of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). Everything she says about the experiences of herself and other women in an industry dominated by men feels uncomfortably familiar.
  
  In these reenactments of the interview, everything appears to be the same—but is it? Elisabeth Subrin makes creative use of the archive material to bring it into the intersectional here and now.