4. Maria
March 2nd, 2024
I want to write about Maria Schneider, but I'm not sure how, or why. How it connects to myself, or the process—why is my instinct to try and find a connection within Vanessa Schneider's memoir My Cousin Maria Schneider; a devastating unpacking of family, celebrity, power, gender, if one can really be “self-destructive” if the “self” was never given a chance to develop, flourish; to even be loved in their most formative, sensitive years? It almost feels disrespectful to take a piece of literature so potent and personal and try to regurgitate it in some way that connects or plays into these ongoing musings that are so tied to something as crude as raising money. It feels wrong, cheap, opportunistic, and yet the urge is overpowering.
Nan Goldin has been at the forefront of my mind recently, and I had no idea that her and Schenider had such an intimate, enduring friendship—there was a feeling of something cosmic seeing Goldin's name in the book after writing last entry; drawing a line between all of the knee-jerk art and film that were offering feelings of energy and sustenance at that very moment. This time, the line was drawn for me. On first glance: stories of art-as-survival, I suppose.
Well, maybe not: one of the most difficult pills to swallow was Vanessa Schneider positing how her cousin Maria was maybe never passionate about her craft; how it was an opportunity laid at her feet at a young age and the years of her being taken advantage of; robbed of her youth and ultimately her life, weren't even in service of something that she had a passion for. It maybe was never “for” anything. I've always been attracted to art-as-survival stories, whether that be in Goldin's work or the plight of John Cassavetes or narratives depicted in films like ‘Round Midnight or even Charulata, from which this company and website takes its name. Not that Maria Schneider was ever given or granted any sense of ownership of her art anyway. The life that her cousin describes is not one that could be described as survival.
I did not know Maria Schneider. She died in February 2011, when I would have been fifteen years-old; around the time I was discovering this “type” of cinema with a level of immersion that was tanking my grades. I did not know her, yet, I'm grasping at straws trying to find something she must have felt ownership or pride of. This is not interpretation of a fictional text, this was a real person, and yet I’m trying to extract a silver lining so *I* can feel “well, at least she had ____”. She had her cousin to write this eulogy; strained as the relationship may have been.
She loved Jacques Rivette. Maybe she felt some ownership working with him. There was The Passenger. Despite a disastrous first meeting with Antonioni, she apparently loved the movie and the process—maybe there was a feeling of ownership there? I hadn't seen the film in years and ordered a blu-ray the morning after finishing the book (it arrived—coincidentally, or not—the same day as a copy of Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency arrived that I'd ordered before reading Schneider's book). I've never felt a kinship with Antonioni in the same way I do with some of his contemporaries and fellow countrymen, and even with the more overtly political entry point for my own tastes/interests, I still—mostly—felt like I was at an arm's length. Of course, it was Schneider's presence that hooked me the most, but not because of her performance—with one glaring exception, she seems uncomfortable on camera; maybe due to her addiction already having allegedly taken ahold of her life during filming—but rather, her presence and what she represents in a film that probes the very nature of identity.
I used to be someone else, but I traded him in.
What the fuck are you doing here with me?
Which me?
A brief segue: weren't these diaries supposed to be about “production”? Well, the process, if we want to unpack that word, is an intertwining of art and the mechanics of realizing art and everything that goes into the realization—sometimes that just concretely means raising money but more often that not it's honing a vision or manuevering systems to realize the vision or sometimes consciously flooring the gas and crashing the vision into the realities of a situation and thinking (or hoping) that something interesting is born out of the friction.
I mentioned “one glaring exception”, and this is the famous scene where Schneider rises in the convertible and turns herself in the other direction, confronting the wind - a form of friction, I guess. There's a smile—a smile that feels so genuine and real—before it fades as her body straightens out and stiffens. The smile feels like ownership, but I have no way of knowing that, I'm just projecting. Maybe it's just acting.
But I guess that's the process of making movies, to some extent. It's projecting and assigning meaning to images and constructing them in a specific order to convey meaning, but all of my collaborators bring their own definitions and interpretations to the characters, the images, the costumes, and my definition and their respective definitions meet each other somewhere in the middle. And then someone watches the film, bringing their entire life with them into the theater (or wherever they're watching it), and then there's one more halfway-meeting point where it all ends, between the viewer and the movie itself. “Maybe it's just acting” will never be enough of an explanation for anything, because it will always exist within the context of something else. I know better to think a single, independent facet of a movie is wholly extractable from the work it exists within.
Maybe that doesn't explain any of this, though. Maybe having warmed up to the fact that control is only an illusion—especially on film sets - doesn't rationalize why I'm needing to pick apart the life and work of Maria Schneider to find a semblance of hope in her story. Maybe that's just being human. And maybe there's something worthwhile in trying to delineate which instincts are which—not so they can be kept separate; rather the opposite—so they can be balanced, integrated; exist in tandem with one another.
A few years ago, my friend Elijah started including “sonic pairings” in his Letterboxd reviews—he told me he lifted the idea from his friend Augie, but the essence was matching a movie with a musical or aural pairing; parallel or complimentary or maybe even existing in some kind of contrast to the film in some capacity, whether that be aesthetic, thematic, and so forth.
While reading Vanessa Schenider's book, I fell into listening to a specific track on a loop from Max Richter's “Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works”—music inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf. In retrospect, it seems fitting—while the author and musician have very different relationships with their subjects; they are both still crafting art with another human being—one who takes on a physically intangible, maybe even celestial shape—as a focal point; a foundation for the work to go in whichever direction it chooses. This approach, or whatever you'd like to call it, was key to cracking what became my second film, A Muse, and that process was the first time I felt like “myself” as an artist—or rather, the myself that I recognize today. Lines, continuing to be drawn.
In the early summer of 2022, in Paris for the first time, I took it upon myself to visit the Montmartre and Montparnasse Cemeteries to visit the graves of François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda & Jacques Demy, Henri-George & Véra Clouzot, Patrice Chéreau. Like most people who make things, I'm in a perpetual struggle with being able to pinpoint my identity as an artist, yet being in the company of these graves gave me not just an overwhelming sense of gratitude for what those who came before me have created, but an equally overwhelming sense of pride in being a conduit. Because there is something incredible about letting people pass through you—people who you never met, people of different nationalities and generations who will never know of your existence, and yet their life's work, their worldviews and idiosyncrasies, pass through you and come out the other side filtered through what you bring to the table and how you see the world; through the life you've lived. And the cycle repeats.
Maria Schneider was cremated and her ashes were scattered at sea by the Rock of the Virgin in Biarritz, France.
But I used the “identity” word again—the word on which The Passenger is built, at least in my view. I'm not sure how it connects—I can't quite draw the line, at least not right now. With Maria Schneider, it's definitely there, I just can't quite pinpoint it, not yet. But even if it's just projection, I'm still motivated; hungry to unearth what was “hers” in her art—and maybe I can be a conduit for that, whatever it is.
Art as survival, I suppose.
Sonic pairing: “Mrs Dalloway, In the Garden" - Max Richter, 2017.