Zoe Beloff in Person

The film is inspired by a series of photographs and texts on hysteria published in the 1880s. It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient named Augustine, a deeply disturbed woman whose extraordinarily theatrical and photogenic hysterical attacks captivated her doctors. The film explores connections between attempts to document Augustine's 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 hospital in Paris, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patients' minds. In this film I wish to show how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D. W. Griffith. I shot the project in a stereoscopic format to suggest a different direction that film might have taken had it been invented in the 1880s. Ultimately what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral “what if . . .”