Zoe Beloff
The Somnambulists
March 5–April 11, 2008

To officially kick off Media City, New York filmmaker Zoë Beloff makes her first appearance in Windsor with the world premiere of her new 3-D installation, “The Somnambulists”.

For the past twenty years, Zoë Beloff has been challenging cinematic and pre-cinematic history by re-imagining the technological evolution of moving image media through her work with 3-D films, stereoscopic projection performances, and interactive media.

The Somnambulists presents the audience with 5 miniature theatres, into which three-dimensional figures are projected
through the use of stereoscopic HD video technologies. Each theatre presents a different “hysterical drama”.

“In the 19th century, people thought of the screen as a window into another world. In keeping with the spirit of popular culture I staged the Somnambulists as musicals, in which the patients (of the Saltpètrie) express their delusions in song.
Because it was shot stereoscopically, the viewer perceives miniature three-dimensional figures that appear to perform on stage. The effect is closer to that of hallucination rather than projection”.

In her work, Beloff deals not only with the beginnings of cinema, but the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The two fields are of course indelibly linked; the “phantom” quality of projected images often struck early film audiences as deeply supernatural, a kind of “conjuring of objects”. Cinematic illusionism has always been a perfect form for the representation of unconscious desire.

“I was inspired by several remarkable developments at the end of the 19th century. There was the discovery of the unconscious by psychotherapists (Freud in Vienna and Pierre Janet in Paris), and the fact that doctors started to film patients with motion picture cameras. At the same time a fascination with madness took hold of the public and ‘acting
hysterical’ became all the rage in Paris cabarets”