Article:

The filmed body and the cinematic gesture: Zoe Beloff’s revisions

Commenting on New York artist Zoe Beloff’s multimedia installation THE INFERNAL DREAM OF MUTT AND JEFF (2011), this article discusses its epistemological and aesthetic explorations, which focus on the problems of movement as a fundamental act of the cinema machine, and of the moving image as an instrument for the psychosocial control of the human body. In a twofold movement of reuse, Beloff’s studies reveal themselves as both cultural and visual, both theoretical and artistic, demonstrating to what extent the specific ‘techniques’ that bring words, things, and bodies together have been the subject not only of films whose main purpose was entertainment, but also of educational films as a genre. For Beloff, cinema is the place where this archaeology of perception transpires in the clearest fashion; where through mechanical, mimetic movement, and through the moving images of bodies and things, we regain access to what Walter Benjamin calls the forgotten ‘powers of magic’. These powers became tangible at the moment when what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘sensory-motor linkages’ were interrupted, and when synesthesia became manifest. In her installation, Beloff reveals by these kinds of interruptions the conditions of a dispositif of visibility in Foucault’s sense of the term – that is, as a system of value distribution.