“Maria Schneider – Belle et rebelle "
Interview: Créteil Films de Femmes, autoportrait, March 2001.
French:
http://www.filmsdefemmes.com/Maria-Schneider-Belle-et-rebelle.html
English translation:
http://jeanmoi.blogspot.com/2011/02/maria-schneider-forget-last-tango.html
Moira Sullivan
For most, the focus for Maria Schneider is on a film that is 40 years old, on a role that was written by Bertolucci for a young boy but was acted by a 19-year-old French woman. A film that in an auteur conceit could have been the second leg of a trilogy on fascism: The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900. Jeanne confronts her sadistic attacker Paul and shoots him. Schneider sums it up: “I must say that the murder in the end of the film did me much good”. Few journalists having a field day with the film’s excesses knew of her work, her life, or her thoughts. For David Thompson (New Republic, February 2011) to impose his reading of a photograph of Schneider at 50 and surmise the reaction of male gazers (“gulping”) says a lot about him.
How can Thompson read so much into a picture or a life of someone he never met, having seen only two of her 40 films? I interviewed Maria Schneider two years before her 50th birthday. She was beautiful and radiant, the Créteil Film de Femmes guest of honor. We saw her films, and heard her words. They drown out the cacophony of the ignorant