Program 8: Off to the Beach: Coney Island

Grandma’s House
Bob Fleischner, 1965, 16mm, 24m

Coney Island
Peter Cramer, 1987, 13m

Sodom by the Sea
Hariet Hirshorn, 1989, 16mm, 17m

Ricki Ticki
Sarah Ema Friedland, 2012, 6m

Selections from The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society’s Dream Films
Zoe Beloff, 2009, 17m

Called “America’s Playground,” “The Poor Man’s Paradise,” “Sodom by the Sea,” or simply and most aptly “Dreamland,” Coney Island has been, for 150 years, the mythic-iconic, fever-dream stage-setting of summer vacation. Sprung up along the rough edge of the working-class immigrant communities of South Brooklyn, Coney Island is both the prototypical, all-American amusement park, packed with dazzling lights and sky-high thrill rides, soft ice cream, and hot dogs, as well as a seedy site of titillating and transforming encounters with the sexual, forbidden, and “other”—under the circus tents at the freak show, on stage at the striptease, cruising beneath the boardwalk, or groping in the darkness on the Tunnel of Love. Though burned to the ground on half a dozen occasions and marked by periods of neglect, Coney Island and its singular power of attraction have endured, and have remained a favorite muse for generations of the city’s artists and filmmakers. These short works selected from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative archive depict Coney Island from the 1920s to the present, tracing the history of its boom-and-bust cycle of decay and rebirth, and capturing its unique visual vocabulary of hand-painted carny banners, fantastical architecture, and glowing neon signage. But most importantly (and intriguingly), they explore Coney Island’s emotional and psychological resonance as one of America’s truly mythic territories: “the Coney Island of the mind,” a dreamland that invokes childhood, memory, and desire. This program was curated by Philomena Mattes.