Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff Surprise: Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin have been reincarnated as an Iranian and an African-American and they roam today’s New York. At times they are a comic duo, at others the voice of our conscience: the babbling couple provides good weapons to attack the world.

Open details →

Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and German playwright Bertolt Brecht recount the brief portions of their lives they spent in Hollywood trying to make art that was both radical and popular.

Open details →

The saga of a movie treatment written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht during his unhappy stint in Hollywood based on a Life Magazine article about a farm family who win a week's stay in a model home at the Ohio State Fair, with the catch that they will be on display to the public.

Open details →

An exploration of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's notes and drawings for a science fiction movie that he pitched to Paramount in 1930 about the residents of a skyscraper with walls and floors of clear glass.

Open details →

Zoe Beloff introduces the other installation, Days of the Commune, in her exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Beloff studied the activities at Occupy Wall Street and created documentary style drawings of what she saw. She then recruited actors, activists and artists to take part in performances of Bert Brecht's play, 'Days of the Commune', written about the Paris Commune of 1871.

Open details →

The Infernal Dream incorporates two archival motion pictures Motion Studies Application and Folie a Deux both artlessly made instructional productions from the early 1950’s. Motion Studies illustrates methods of Scientific Management to show how work more efficiently on the assembly line. “Folie à Deux” is the clinical name of a contagious paranoid. The film was made to illustrate how to identify, but not treat, this mental disorder. Together they show two sides of the same coin, the presentation of the productive and unproductive body. The efficient and orderly gestures of women stuffing envelopes in Motion Studies Application find their distorted reflection in flamboyant gestures of the mother and daughter in Folie à Deux. In both films people are represented as the bearers of motion. One could call them objects.

Open details →

(Fictional history) A film by Eddie Kammerer (1972), 16mm sound

Open details →

(Fictional history): Year : 1964 Filmmaker: Robert Troutman "Bobby Beaujolais" Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from an 8mm Kodachrome camera original with magnetic stripped sound. Music: "The Man that Got Away" and "Somewhere over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland on the album, "Judy at Carnegie Hall" Running time: 5 minutes 10 seconds

Open details →

(Fictional history): Year: 1954 Filmmaker: Beverly d'Angelo Transfer note: copied at 24 frames per second from a 16mm Kodachrome original with magnetic stripped sound. Sound: from the album "Wild Percussion and Horns A'Plenty" Dick Schory's New Percussion Ensemble Running time: 3 minutes 5 seconds

Open details →

(Fictional history): Year: 1945 Filmmaker: Molly Lippman Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a Regular 8mm black and white Kodak film, and Regular 8mm Kodachrome original. Running time: 3 minutes 46 seconds Silent

Open details →

(Fictional history): Year: 1931 Filmmaker: Charmian de Forde Music: Duke Ellington, "Mooche", "Black and Tan" Transfer note: copied at 24 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak print with variable density optical sound track. Running time: 6 minutes 22 seconds

Open details →

Teddy Weisengrund, a member of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, recreates one of his dreams on film and analyzes it according to Freud's theories.

Open details →

(Fictional history): Year: 1926 Filmmaker: Albert Grass Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak safely film original. Running time: 2 minutes 41 seconds Silent

Open details →

(Fictional history): This film was made by in 1937 Arthur Rosenzweig, a member of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Here he recreates one of his dreams on film and analyzes it according to Freud's theories.

Open details →

(Fictional history): Years: 1926,1927,1934 Filmmakers: not known Transfer note: copied at 18 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak safely film original. Running time: 5 minutes 28 seconds Silent

Open details →

(Fictional history) A film by Stella Weiss (1962) 16mm silent

Open details →

Augustine was the most extensively photographed of the young women hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris of the 1870's She was 'the Sarah Bernhardt' of the asylum. This is her story.

Open details →

The title and the narrative are taken from the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth d’Espérance, a materializing medium who could produce full body apparitions. We discover a lonely little girl who can conjure imaginary friends that appear, to her, completely real. This remarkable ability causes her much suffering, for upon reaching adolescence, she is diagnosed as mad on account of seeing people who are not there. Only later does she find a way to cultivate her gifts within the spiritualist movement.

Open details →

Beyond is a mysterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. One might call it an investigation of the "dream life" of technology, from around 1850 to 1940.

Open details →

Alice ends up in the derelict houses of Coney Island and Times Square. She sinks into a wonderland of decadence and despair, into the no-mans-land of lost souls, charlatans, broken dreams and cheap perversions.

Open details →

Inspired by J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, the film focuses on Jack and Diana Weston, who, after suffering a car crash, find their lives intruded upon by Dr. de Freis, a chronicler of car accidents who attempts to verify the psychological changes that occur in victims of accidents and the subsequent articulation of their anxieties.

Open details →

Open details →

The film is a work of remembrance. It asks but does not answer the question how does everyday art bring people together? One by one, the community that is the Mouse People, recite the text of Franz Kafka's short story in quite places on New York's Lower East Side. The film presents Josephine's story, as something transmitted across time, something that comes from inside the body of an oppressed people; spoken alone, summoned mysteriously, at the edge of consciousness. Why was it that Josephine's voice so captivated them?

Open details →

Documentation of The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society from 1926 and 1934. All ten films on a single 40-minute reel.

Open details →