Carrie Schneider’s “FLW”

In her new film installation FLW, Carrie Schneider teases out La Jetée’s (1962) ancient tropes by isolating a decidedly classical eight-second clip from the twenty-seven minute film: a close up of The Woman, played by Hélène Châtelain, blinking at the camera after stirring from sleep. By centering the lover whom the protagonist would go to the ends of the earth—and the ends of time—to retrieve, Schneider transforms Chris Marker’s film into a contemporary reappraisal of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. That The Woman is our Eurydice goes without saying. But The Man is not our Orpheus. Rather, it is Schneider herself.

Writing in 1955, Maurice Blanchot likened Orpheus’s pursuit of Eurydice to the artist’s pursuit of their craft. The artist’s purpose, Blanchot says, is to descend into the depths and bring back the night, giving it “form, figure, and reality” in the daylight.1 As a photographer committed to pushing chromogenic film past its imaginative and physical limits, Schneider does exactly that. Working in the darkness of the early morning so that she can fully control her lighting, Schneider holds up found imagery to the lens of a custom-built room-sized camera and then translates the resulting negative back into a positive through multiple exposures, layering objects and materials from her studio to create a painterly effect. For Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys” at the Venice Biennale, Schneider exposed each frame of The Woman’s waking in La Jetée several times over onto a one-kilometer roll of Fujifilm. Installed as a looping concertina with steel bars for support, the resulting photograph, First Living Woman (2026), is the largest chromogenic print ever made. It is also FLW’s antecedent: for the companion exhibition at David Peter Francis, Schneider rephotographed her work frame-by-frame onto Super 16mm film, which is then projected onto a fourteen-foot screen.

Not only does Schneider mirror Orpheus in her painstaking labor and her dogged dedication, but she also mirrors him in her recursion—her desire to restore, to return, to reanimate the dead. Accessed by the artist via a pirated digital transfer on YouTube, The Woman was trapped in a realm that was not her own. Schneider retrieves The Woman by bringing her back to the analog. But, as in La Jetée, a sense of failure also looms. Throughout FLW, the abstract markers of Schneider’s in-camera process—swathes of color, dots, and bars—eclipse Châtelain’s visage. She is as defaced by the analog as she is saved by it. These marks confirm FLW’s critical stance. It is less a nostalgic paean to an increasingly obsolete medium, more a meditation on the delicate, difficult dance of moving from analog to digital and back again.

Schneider foregrounds this dance by allowing the apparatuses that hold Châtelain’s digital image—her hands, her iPhone—to be seen in every frame. Painted fingernails remind the viewer that the artist photographing The Woman is also one, that her motivations for retrieval are different from the heterosexual lover in La Jetée. Throughout her oeuvre, Schneider has repurposed scenes of women refusing to be acknowledged (Romy Schneider, “No photos please” in 1975’s L’important c’est d’aimer) or refusing to acknowledge others (Mariah Carey, “I don’t know her” in a celebrated meme), while also probing the dynamics of identification (note the shared names). She gives us only these women’s images—leaving the viewer to piece together their contexts, to recover the quotes that resonated with her.

Yet Châtelain’s Woman is distinct from Romy Schneider and Mariah Carey because she both embraces the viewer’s gaze and gazes back. Sight becomes a source of strife for La Jetée’s Man; his vision is frequently obstructed by blindfolds and dark sunglasses, while his final glance at The Woman proves his undoing. In a flashback, he assumes his lover met a similar fate during the war to come. But we are given no visual evidence that this is so. Contra Eurydice, who was banished back to the underworld, it is quite possible that The Woman carries on following The Man’s death. We certainly know that Châtelain did—like Schneider, she moved behind the camera and became a filmmaker.

In the final forty-five seconds of FLW, both Châtelain’s eyes and Schneider’s hands disappear from view. Faced with a darkened screen, the viewer is left to listen to the whir of the projector looping the 16mm film. Some might take this as their cue to exit, but I felt compelled to investigate further. While examining the mechanics of the projector, I snapped an iPhone picture of its label so that I could learn more about the particular model that Schneider used. I did this partly because of my own care for the technology—but mostly because I knew a fastidious artist like Schneider would have also cared. Manufactured by Bell & Howell in the late 1980s, the 3580 Super Slim Slotload 16mm Filmosound hit the market at the same time digital technologies were becoming accessible to average consumers. A vestige from a prior time, Schneider’s projector was positioned at the historical interstice between analog and digital. The choice felt intentional.

It also felt appropriate that my research into this analog device would be made possible by a digital image and would require the use of a digital technology like the internet. I wanted to show Schneider the same care she showed Châtelain by following her technical choices to the end of their path, much like Orpheus followed Eurydice. But I also knew my steps would look slightly different. While Orphic impulses color FLW, they do not ultimately drive it. This is not work about tragic disappearance and heroic retrieval, nor does it demand banishing the digital to the underworld. Instead, it reveals how the digital might be used to support the analog—and how the commingling of the two modes might metamorphose an ancient story about heterosexual desire into a contemporary provocation of feminist identification.