DREAMLAND: THE CONEY ISLAND AMATEUR PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY DREAM FILMS
Presented by Zoe Beloff
USA, Approx. 80 minutes
Silent/English

THURSDAY, MAY 9 – 8:00 and 10:00 PM

In 1926, after returning to New York after World War I, Albert Grass assembled a group of his friends (largely working-class people), all of whom had an interest in Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, into a society that met in an office on Coney Island to discuss their inner lives. A major project of the secretive Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, as they were known, was making films of members’ dreams, in the service of understanding the life of the mind.  Years later, with the Society all but an urban legend, multimedia artist and filmmaker Zoe Beloff discovered some mysterious, Freudian 16mm home movies at a flea market, and made it her mission to collect and preserve, as well as understand, the films.

Now, for one night only at Spectacle, Zoe Beloff will present the collected films of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in their original 16mm format. Filmed between 1926 and 1972, the films present the uncovered dreams, fears, and desires of Society members throughout the decades. These nine short films are beautiful, poignant, and surprising by turns, and present the raw, unfiltered inner emotional lives of several generations of Brooklynites.