Niels Van Tomme: Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926-1972, 2009-2010, reveals an ingenious tale centered on an amateur psychoanalytic film club supposedly active in Coney Island throughout a significant part of the twentieth century. The project constructs a working-class utopia in which psychoanalysis mirrors socialism's public promise to change the world. How did you get involved with such an atypical topic?
Zoe Beloff: I've been coming to Coney Island just for fun ever since I moved to New York in the early 1980s. Spaces like this are very evocative for me. Many of my works conjure up a world where science meets spectacle or sideshow....
   In 2007, I read Norman Klein's short story Freud in Coney Island, 2006, which relates Freud's visit to Coney Island in 1909. I thought it was great and gave a copy to Aaron Beebe, the director of the Coney Island Museum. The next day, he called me up and asked me if I would do an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Freud's visit. His idea was to invite artists to do projects, incorporating objects from the Museum's collection in ways that might reveal new meanings and hidden connections. I had no idea what I would do, but the idea seemed so perfect for me that I had to say "yes."

+ read more

Hollywood has had a long, tortuous, and often contradictory relationship with Nazi imagery in feature films. In the lead up to WWII, before the U.S. got involved, Hollywood treated the rise of the Third Reich with kid gloves. But after WWII and especially in the last fifteen years, America has increasingly used the Nazi, and in particular, their role as perpetrators of the Holocaust, as a signifier of absolute evil. One aspect of these representations of Nazis focuses on Jewish victimhood and weakness. But increasingly Jews are shown in film as participants in active and aggressive resistance.
   Edward Zwick's Defiance, 2008, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, 2009, present two recent examples of this kind of Jewish revenge narrative. Sited in WWII Poland, Defiance tells the story of two Jewish brothers who draw on their past as brutal criminals to fight back against German soldiers. Inglourious Basterds focuses on a band of Jewish American soldiers who rampage through occupied France, scalping and killing Nazis. While it took a long time for studio executives and the American government to feel comfortable with frank filmic depictions of the Holocaust, these newer films are unique in their unabashed glorification of violence and retribution. Furthermore, they use violence in a way that is meant to be both pleasurable and entertaining.

+ read more