ESSAY FILM FESTIVAL: Illustrated talk by Zoe Beloff, including screenings of three films, and conversation with Esther Leslie & Laura Mulvey
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Free event: Register here
In these three recent films, A Model Family in a Model Home, Two Marxists in Hollywood, and A Glass House, Zoe Beloff returns to and resurrects the greatest exponents of dialogue between radical politics and radical aesthetics: Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein.
The pair come together in Two Marxists in Hollywood, which tells the very different stories of their paradoxical, and ultimately unsuccessful, aspirations to collaborate with the Hollywood film industry. But, as Beloff, points out: if their utopian projects ended in failure, 'what if they did not [fail], what if their ideas were merely lying in wait for us?' As she interweaves the two men's histories, anecdotes of their Hollywood experiences, with their theoretical principles, Beloff also interweaves visually and cinematically different levels of time. The film is shot in its Hollywood 'now' of 2015, emphasised by the presence of DJ Rapture in the soundtrack, but the 'interviews' with the two characters are played out against Beloff's exquisitely painted backdrops of Hollywood 'then', also juxtaposing theatricality with the actuality of the locations. These distanciation-effects are accentuated by the casting of Brecht and Eisenstein as twelve-year-old boys.
In Two Marxists in Hollywood, both Eisenstein and Brecht mention projects that were inspired by their time in the USA: Brecht describes 'A Model Family in a Model Home'; Eisenstein describes 'A Glass House'. Beloff's film reconstructions of these 'failed' projects will also be screened as part of this special event. Both projects revolved around very different mediations of the politics of architecture, but, through Beloff's films, they have found a dialectical relation to each other.
Two Marxists in Hollywood, Zoe Beloff, USA, 2015, HD video, 26 mins, with Bryan Yoshi Brown, Ben Taylor
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A Model Family in a Model Home, Zoe Beloff, USA, 2015, HD video, 22 mins
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A Glass House, Zoe Beloff, USA, 2015, HD video, 21 mins, with Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington
Contact phone:
0207 631 6115