The Tramp’s New World

222

Screenings


August 28    20:35
DEBATOUN GUESTHOUSE


The Tramp’s New World
USA, 2021, 60’
in English w/Arm.subtitles

Director and Scriptwriter: Zoe Beloff
Producers: Zoe Beloff, Stacey Maltin
Cinematographer: Eric Muzzy
Editors: Zoe Beloff, Eric Muzzy
Cast: Barrett Martin, Diana DeLaCruz, Steven Ratazzi, George La Monte and others

The Tramp’s New World is a meditation on and a visualization of the scenario that writer and film critic James Agee wrote in 1948 for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. The film interweaves two cinematic spheres. In one, Agee, dramatized by an actor, conjures up and imagines his ideas for the movie; in the other, Chaplin himself, montaged by Beloff from relevant clips, enacts the story and the political message it carries.

Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings, and archival documents organized around a theme. They include proposals for new forms of community. She created a trilogy of movies, based on never-realized ideas for films by radical artists; Eisenstein’s Scenario Glass House, Brecht’s A Model Family in a Model Home, and James Agee’s The Tramp’s New World. Most recently, she completed @WORK, a documentary public art project about the workers who keep New York City moving. Zoe’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings, including the Whitney Museum Biennale, Site Santa Fe, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, the Pompidou Center in Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and FID Marseille.

Filmography

Nightmare Angel (1986), Wonderland (1991), A Trip to the Land of Knowledge (1994), Lost (1995), A Mechanical Medium (1999), Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society: Dream Films (2009), The Days of the Commune (2012), Glass House (2014), A Model Family in a Model Home (2015), Two Marxists in Hollywood (2015), Exile (2018), The Tramp’s New World (2021), @WORK (2022).