2 M I H | 4 - 6 - 18 | 8 P M

Welcome back, Zoe Beloff!

A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood 

Tickets $15 General Admission / $13 VPES Members

Friday, April 6, 2018
 
Doors 7:30 P.M. / Introductory Presentation by Zoe Beloff 8:00 P.M. / Films 8:30 P.M.
 

In 1930, Soviet 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. In A World Redrawn - a project that encompassed an exhibition, a book and three films - Zoe Beloff explores their unrealized film scenarios "Glass House" and "A Model Family in a Model Home” and reimagines them for today.

Zoe Beloff returns to the Velaslavasay to discuss the project and screen the three films.
 

TWO MARXISTS IN HOLLYWOOD - 26 minutes HD video, sound (2015) - Interviews with Eisenstein and Brecht in contemporary Los Angeles. (Filmed in part at the Velaslavasay Panorama)

GLASS HOUSE - 22 minutes HD video, sound (2014) - A film based on Eisenstein’s scenario for a science fiction movie about a world of total visibility that also involves a ruthless robot.

A MODEL FAMILY IN A MODEL HOME - 22 minutes HD video sound (2015) - This film is inspired by Brecht’s notes for a movie based on an article in Life Magazine. A farm family wins a week's stay in a model home, and everything goes wrong.

 

Zoe Beloff is an artist and filmmaker who considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Each project aims to connect the present to past so that it might illuminate the future in new ways. She recently completed the installation “Emotions go to Work” and the the film “Exile" in which Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht find themselves in New York today. Unfixed, oscillating between their time and ours, they reveal what has been buried in our own history, making connections between fascism in New York in the1930’s and its recent manifestation. Zoe is very happy to be able to present A World Redrawn at this particular venue since the films themselves were inspired by her visits to Los Angeles and “Two Marxists” was shot in part at the Velaslavasay Panorama.
 

 
A still from the book

 

Copies of Zoe's book A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood will be available for purchase. The book, published by Christine Burgin, reproduces many important and little-known documents from the period, including a large selection of previously unpublished drawings by Eisenstein discovered by Beloff in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow and facsimile reproductions of the writings of Eisenstein and Brecht as they contemplate the politics and culture of Hollywood.

Event page on our website, and tickets available here.

Thank you kindly for your attention,
 

The Velaslavasay Panorama
1122 W 24th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
213-746-2166
event@panoramaonview.org
@velaslavasaypanorama