[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Presents: HYSTERICS & MENTALISTS: Two 3D Films By Zoe Beloff (Tues., Nov. 11)

[Watter, Seth]

​

Magic Lantern Cinema Presents



HYSTERICS AND MENTALISTS

Two 3D Films by Zoe Beloff



Tuesday, November 11th, 2014 @ 8:30 PM

Cable Car Cinema & Cafe

Providence, RI

$5



Artist in person!



What do psychologists, spiritualists, and filmmakers have in common? Each
is in some way concerned with the making-visible of what is normally
invisible, whether it be the hidden recesses of the unconscious, the voices
of the dead, or the world of human passions as they manifest themselves on
our faces and in our gestures. For over two decades, Zoe Beloff has been
using cinematic technology as a probe into the collective fantasies of our
visual culture, which are not so far removed from the 19th century as we
sometimes think. Her work is a sustained exploration of the concept of
“medium,” which is never simply a mechanical device but a point of juncture
between past and future, here and elsewhere, the visible and the invisible,
the living and the dead. The arcane devices she often employs—such as
stereoscopic film, 78rpm phonographs, and slide projectors—are more than
just quaint relics of a bygone era. They are conduits through which we,
too, might commune with the past; they conjure up something of the wonder
and the ritual that the earliest spectators of moving images might have
felt. As an artist and a thinker, Beloff asks us to ponder what Freud and
Coney Island share, what it means to “project” an image into the world, and
why the French still refer to film screenings as *séances*.



*Shadowland, or Light From the Other Side, 2000, 32 min., b&w/sound, 16mm
stereoscopic film projection*

“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 traces this complex interaction between the birth of cinema in
relation to both conjuring and mediumship. My phantoms are drawn from magic
lantern slides, glass negatives and early cinema footage. Indeed some of
the scenes themselves are stereoscopic reconstructions of films from the
1890's” (ZB)



*Charming Augustine, 2005, 40 min., b&w/sound, 16mm stereoscopic film
projection*

“The film is inspired by series of photographs and texts on hysteria
published by the great insane asylum in Paris in the 1880’s under the title
of the *Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere*. It is an
experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine. At
fifteen she was admitted to the hospital suffering from hysterical
paralysis. The doctors were captivated by her frequent hysterical attacks.
They appeared extraordinarily theatrical and photogenic. She became the
star, the ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ of the asylum. Yet at the same she was deeply
disturbed. She had visions and heard voices. She hallucinated. The film
explores connections between attempts to document her mental states and the
prehistory of narrative film… To conjure up a time just prior to the
invention of cinema, I shot the film in a stereoscopic format to suggest a
different direction that cinema might have taken had it been invented in
the 1880’s” (ZB).



ABOUT THE ARTIST: Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1980 she
moved to New York to study at Columbia University where she received an MFA
in Film. Her work has been featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art,
Site Santa Fe, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in
Paris, among others. Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, in the
edited collection *Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography* (Duke,
2008), and in several artist’s books published in collaboration with
Christine Burgin Gallery (New York). Her most recent completed project is *The
Days of the Commune*, a 2012 production of Bertolt Brecht’s play staged in
conjunction with Occupy Wall Street; documentation of this work was
recently featured at PARTICIPANT INC. (New York). She is currently working
on a new project called the “The IFIF” (Institute for Incipient Film) about
Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood and the films they might have made. She
is a Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens
College CUNY.



More info @ http://www.magiclanterncinema.com

https://www.facebook.com/events/562743853854365/


** Magic Lantern is generously funded by the Forbes Center for Culture and
Media Studies at Brown University and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
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