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.

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.

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.

Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, it centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, it centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world.

Evocative yet playful, Life Forgotten asks, how does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? Situating archival film in parallel with reenactment, the film conjures up New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, it centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world.

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.

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.

In 1948 the James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin's Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Gradually a small community of the dispossessed grows up around him. For Agee, his story was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism and just how hard that is in the face of our modern technological world. The film focuses on his imaginative journey and what it might mean for us today.

In 1948 the James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin's Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Gradually a small community of the dispossessed grows up around him. For Agee, his story was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism and just how hard that is in the face of our modern technological world. The film focuses on his imaginative journey and what it might mean for us today.

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

This interview is with Ah Bao, a knife sharpener and shoe repair man in New York City's Chinatown.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

(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

(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

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.

(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

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.

This interview is with Michael Paul Britto, Community Coordinator at Forsyth Satellite Academy High School, as well as an arts educator and artist.

(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.

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

(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

(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

No synopsis available yet.

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.

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.

Our emotions are increasingly being turned into commodities, manipulated by global corporations. This hack of an IBM commercial suggests how. What does the future hold for a world where people are treated like objects, while online objects are being granted agency and becoming increasingly anthropomorphic?

(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

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