14th September 2010
Doors at 6 pm, Film commences at 7 pm
The artist Zoe Beloff will introduce her film and be available for questions.
“Charming Augustine” is inspired by series of photographs and texts on hysteria published in the 1870s in Paris. It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine. The doctors were captivated by her frequent hysterical attacks. They appeared extraordinarily theatrical and photogenic. At the same she was deeply disturbed, she had visions and heard voices. The film explores connections between attempts to document her mental states and the prehistory of narrative film. While Marey and Muybridge attempted to study the mechanics of the body, the doctors at the Salpêtrière, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patient's minds.
In this film, Zoe shows how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith. She shot the project in a stereoscopic format to suggest a different direction that film might have taken had it been invented in the 1880's.
Zoe Beloff on Augustine, "Ultimately what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if… a moment in time when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized."
Talk at 11 Mare Street - please click here to buy tickets
