Pen and Paper Revolutionaries: Punk Auteur Takes Over the Airwaves

brin likes to push boundaries. She invigorated Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Department, with an unorthodox approach to film and strong feminist perspective. In the film industry, she is known for up-to-the-moment work that toes the line between fiction and documentary. “I’ve kind of straddled the film and the art world,” Subrin says.

Subrin is best known for a film trilogy, first shown at the New York Film Festival, that tracks three women who are dealing with questions of history and identity, specifically how women are or are not represented in history. The films took Subrin eight years to complete. “When I show them as a trilogy in one screening, it’s really emotional for me because they’re all about women who have struggled and taken risks,” she says.

Like the women she films, Subrin is a risk-taker—in the classroom and in her film-making. Susannah P. Morse ’04, one of Subrin’s thesis advisees, has been studying with her for the past two years. “I think she definitely taught me to look at images, like to pair them up,” Morse said. As an example, she tells of one of Subrin’s films that used simple, poignant images—no action shots—of suicide victims. This attention to the “scene” and still images is a technique not often used in film-making, but one that Subrin has given new life.

This summer, Subrin will travel to the Sundance Institute for what she calls her “biggest accomplishment.” The script, one of eight chosen from over 3500, was selected by the institute to be have four scenes shot with a professional cast and crew. Fellow VES Rudolf Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking, Robb Moss says Subrin was chosen “because her work is interesting and fresh.” He explains, “She works at creating images that flow off of each other to create an idea rather than strictly following the fiction plot.”

In addition to her own projects, Subrin has collaborated with feminist art-pop musical group Le Tigre on music videos.