LIFE FORGOTTEN

Forthcoming spring 2025
Principle cast: Ariel Shafir, Kate Valk, Maria Perez, Spencer Quartin, Lexie Waddy, Jay Dobkin, Miranda Dobkin, Joanie Fritz Zosike, Amaya Montañez, Stella Noor Hamza, Leila Ibragim-Zade, Eli Fliakos , Johnny Anthony
Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
Set in New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, the film 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.

JOSEPHINE THE SINGER OR THE MOUSE PEOPLE

Forthcoming spring 2025
Principle Cast: Kate Valk, Ben Katchor, Maria Perez, Jay Dobkin, Joanie Fritz Zosike, Carol Freeman, Ilana Wallach, Trudi Cohen, Stella Noor Hamza, Eli Fliakos
Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
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?

THE TRAMP'S NEW WORLD

62 minutes (2021)
Cast: Barrett Martin, Diana DeLaCruz - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
In 1948 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.
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Watch a discussion about the film between Zoe Beloff and Laura Mulvey
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EXILE

51 minutes (2018)
Cast: Afshin Hashemi, Eric Berryman, Paul Lazar, Marie Pohl - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
The philosopher Walter Benjamin and his friend the playwright Bertolt Brecht spent time together in exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. In this film they are still in exile, only now in New York City 2017. In the intervening years they have changed because in our contemporary world, refugees and victims of racism look different. Brecht is Iranian. Benjamin is African American. "Exile" is an essay film incorporating actors, archival footage and documentary scenes that makes connections between fascism in the 1930s and what is going on in America today.
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A MODEL FAMILY IN A MODEL HOME

22 minutes (2015)
Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
Fleeing from the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles in 1941. This film is inspired by notes for movie that he based on an article in Life Magazine called A Model Family in a Model Home. It explores Brecht’s ideas about working people and the home as a stage upon which larger political and social forces are played out.
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TWO MARXISTS IN HOLLYWOOD

26 minutes (2015)
Cast: Bryan Yoshi Brown, Ben Taylor - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
In 1930 Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein spent six months in Los Angeles under contract with Paramount. A decade later German playwright and theater director Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany, lived there from 1941 to 1947. Both set out to make films in Hollywood on their own terms. Working in the world's most famous factory of dreams, they believed that artists must call into question the way we understand our world.They wanted to make art that was both radical and popular.
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GLASS HOUSE

21 minutes (2015)
Cast: Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
A film based on Sergei Eisenstein’s notes and drawings for a science fiction movie that he pitched to Paramount Studios in 1930. Its theme is the architecture of surveillance.
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THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE

2 hours 35 minutes (2012)
In the spring of 2012 I brought together a group of actors, activists and artists to perform "The Days of the Commune" a play by Bert Brecht in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first great Occupation in modern history. Thinking about OWS as a radical theater of the people, inspired us to conceptualize this project as a “work in progress” in a sense that all social movements are a work in progress. Rather than stage the play in a theater, we performed it scene by scene in public spaces around New York City.
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A Blu-ray is available. Send $20 via PayPal to zoe@zoebeloff.com (free shipping worldwide)

CONEY ISLAND AMATEUR PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY-DREAM FILMS

40 minutes (2009)
These films appear to come from the archive of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and were first exhibited publically in an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Freud's visit to Coney Island. Each year memebers held a competition in which members re-enacted their dreams on film. These films can be thought of as a record of the hopes fears and fantasies of a changing cross section of those that made up the fabric of Coney Island, from immigrant Jews and Italians to wealthy bohemians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960’s.
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Rent or purchase from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Available on 16mm or digital file.

CHARMING AUGUSTINE

Stereoscopic 16mm Film 40 minutes (2005)
Cast: Tea Alagic, Greg Mehrten, Josh Stark, Steven Rattazi, Kevin Maher, Eileen White, Eliza Fernbach - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
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.
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CLAIRE AND DON IN SLUMBERLAND

16mm Film and 3D Slide projection performance 37 minutes (2002)
Cast:Emily McDonell, Josh Stark - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
A projection performance that lurches between the monstrous and the ludicrous. Guided by sounds from two 1949 psychology films: HYPNOTIC BEHAVIOUR and UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION wafting over the airwaves, Claire and Don find themselves uncontrollably acting out post war America’s fears and anxieties.
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SHADOW LAND OR LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Stereoscopic 16mm B/W Film 32 minutes (2000)
Cast: Kate Valk, Paul Lazar, Gen Ken Montgomery, Luna Montgomery, Shelley Hirsch - Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
A 3D film based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth D’Espérance, a materialization medium who could produce full body apparitions.
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A MECHANICAL MEDIUM

Performance for Model B Kodascope16mm projector, Stereo Slide projector, 78 rpm phonograph, Tri Signal Toy telegraph Unit and other sound making machines. One hour (1999)
A collaboration with sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery.
Few people know that Edison spent the last ten years of his life attempting to build an apparatus to communicate with the dead, in his words, a mechanical medium. Though his device was never found, we will attempt, in the spirit of his enquiry to do the impossible, to conjure up phantoms, to glimpse the hereafter.
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LOST

Performance for stereo slides, hand-cranked projector and 78 rpm gramophone records. 20 minutes (1995)
A document of everyday life on New York's Lower East Side. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin; a spectacle not of life remembered but of life forgotten. Like dream images these cinematic fragments are hieroglyphic clues to a past illuminated at the very moment of its disappearance.
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A TRIP TO THE LAND OF KNOWLEDGE

16mm film 65 minutes (1994)
Cast: Kate Valk, David Patrick Kelly
A young girl escapes from her drab black and white reality into Kodachrome fantasy only to find herself face to face with her worst fears. Juxtaposing documentary footage of my old high school in Scotland with found home movies and staged melodrama, the film describes what if feels like to be anadolescent girl. Pressured by parents and teachers, she refuses to fulfil their expectations experiencing the scary awakening of sexuality as her body grows out of control.

LIFE UNDERWATER

An hour long B/W 16mm Film/3D Side/Music live-performance (1994)
A collaboration with composer John Cale, commissioned by The Arts at St. Annes. "There is the mariner. Ready for the sea. Where his footsteps will not beheard, nor leave their mark, so much lost in time...." So begins Cale's story of a sailor forever in flight from his youth. The imagery is very much inspired by the frozen landscape of 19th century stereo views, and the birth of cinema; a vain attempt to recapture those first moments when the depiction of the world began to move.

WONDERLAND USA

35mm B/W Film 6 minutes (1989)
Cast: Cast: John Cale, Eszter Balint, Taylor Mead, Everett Quinton
Lured by a lonely writer, Alice finds herself falling into a wonderland ofdecadence and despair; a New York nether world of lost souls and cut-rate charlatans hawking broken dreams and cheap perversions. Set in the ruins of Coney Island and Times Square, the film brings to life the underside of Lewis Caroll's classic.

NIGHTMARE ANGEL

16mm B/W Film 30 minutes (1986)
Cast: Bill Moseley, Audrey Matson, James Selby - Producer and co-director: Susasn Emerling
A film inspired by J.G. Ballard's novels Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition.
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Rent or purchase from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Available on 16mm or digital file.