Exile

Exile

Zoe Beloff
2018 , 50:47 min, color, sound, HD video

Description

Writes Zoe Beloff: "The philosopher Walter Benjamin and his friend playwright Bertolt Brecht spent time together in exile from Nazi Germany. Exile imagines that they are still in exile in New York, 2017. In the intervening years they have changed—in the contemporary world, refugees and victims of racism look different. Brecht is Iranian. Benjamin is African American. The down-at-heel comic duo are vagabonds in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy or Vladimir and Estragon; they are still doing what they always did, showing us how society works with whatever they have to hand—words, images, and suggestions on how to tell the truth in a world full of lies. Unfixed, oscillating between their time and ours, Brecht and Benjamin reveal what has been buried in our own history, making connections between fascism in New York in the 1930s and its manifestation in the Trump era."