The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films, 1926-1972

The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films, 1926-1972, consists of nine short films purported to have been discovered in the archives of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Established in 1926 by amusement park employee Albert Grass and other working-class Coney Island residents, the group was dedicated to the practice of Freudian analysis, and held an annual competition in which members were encouraged to make use of new 16mm home-movie technology and reenact their dreams, fears, and fantasies on camera. The films mix footage of old Coney Island and intimate narratives of immigrant Jews and Italians grappling with marriage, motherhood, and the Holocaust, young gay men and bohemian socialites exploring their sexuality, and Grass himself fantasizing about building the “Royal Road to the Unconscious on the site of Sodom by the Sea,” a reimagined version of the burnt-down Dreamland amusement park that would be designed in accordance with Freudian principles and bring Freud’s theory of dream formation to a popular audience.

Installed as part of a wider multimedia exhibit and book project conceived by artist Zoe Beloff at the Coney Island Museum in 2009, commemorating the centennial of Freud’s 1909 visit to Coney Island, these films dwell in the ambiguities between the real and the imagined. Beloff offers the words of legendary showman P.T. Barnum, who when asked about the authenticity of his exhibits, replied: “That’s just the question. Persons who pay their money at the door have the right to form their own opinions after they have gone upstairs.”

The Film-Makers' Cooperative is pleased to show a newly acquired 16mm print of the Dream Films and to welcome Beloff to the FMC screening room for a conversation with program curator Philomena Mattes.

Zoe Beloff is an artist, writer, filmmaker and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York, with a number of films in the Filmmaker’s Coop collection, including Nightmare Angel (1986), the first screen adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, and two movies based on ideas for films proposed by never realized by radical artists; Brecht’s A Model Family in a Model Home (2015) and James Agee’s The Tramp’s New World (2021). With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future, exploring relationships between labor, technology and our inner lives. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings at the Whitney Museum Biennale, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center in Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam and FID Marseille. She is a professor at Queens College CUNY.