Event Details
City Lore is pleased to screen the The Navigators a film by Noah Teichner on Sunday, August 2nd at 6 pm at the City Lore Gallery located at 56 East First Street. The film is presented in conjunction with Zoe Beloff’s installation, Forgotten Life, on view through September 13, 2026.
About The Navigators
In 1919 the American government deports 249 anarchists and radicals on the “Soviet Ark” including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Five years later, this same ship becomes the decor of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy The Navigator. This remarkable coincidence was the starting point for a wildly original film by Noah Teichner.
About Noah Teichner (1987, USA) is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher based in Paris. In his films, installations, and performances, he often reworks collected and archival materials to experiment with creative forms of historiography across old and new media.His feature-length essay film Navigators (2022) was made at the artist-run film lab L’Abominable. It had a theatrical release in France in 2023 and has screened internationally at venues and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, ICA London, Light Industry, Svenska filminstitutet, Cinéma du Réel, and Archivio Aperto. As a film and media historian, his fields of research include comedy and popular entertainment, film technology, sound studies, and media archaeology. His current project Comedy Objects mixes historical research with speculative fiction to think about comedy workers in the United States during the Great Depression. He is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris and an associate member of the research center ESTCA (Université Paris 8).
About Life Forgotten - Life Forgotten is a series of artworks, a film and a book that brings together the sewing machine and the showman and imagines the encounter between early cinema and young women labor activists of the Lower East Side in the early 20th Century. Situating archival footage in parallel with reenactment, the film centers on Frank Seiden’s storefront cinema at 58 Willett Street. Like many nickelodeons in the neighborhood, it was a welcoming space for women. The film follows a group of radical young garment workers led by the young Clara Leimlich who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world. This work poses questions and offers a few signposts. How does everyday entertainment bring people together and act as a catalyst for social change? How does history grow out of and weigh upon lived experience? How can people without power or influence change their world?
About Zoe Beloff - Zoe is an artist, filmmaker, writer and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York. She aims to make art that both entertains and provokes discussion. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. Many works also go out into the world as books.
Life Forgotten and its public programs received support from New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist grant, New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement and PSC-CUNY;
About City Lore
Founded in 1985, and now an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, City Lore’s mission is to foster New York City – and America’s – living cultural heritage through education and public programs.We document, present, and advocate for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions.We work in four cultural domains:urban folklore and history; preservation; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each of these realms, we see ourselves as furthering cultural equity and modeling a better world with projects as dynamic and diverse as New York City itself.For more info: http://www.citylore.org.
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