This video by Joseph Beuys takes its name from the famous gangster John Dillinger. After a long chase, the latter is betrayed by a friend in 1934, and beaten by the police in front of a movie theatre in Chicago. It is this event that Joseph Beuys replays in this video, at the very site where it occurred: sporting his usual felt hat and a hare's fur coat, Joseph Beuys leaves the cinema and starts running, collapsing a few metres further on, as though riddled with bullets.

In this work, produced during his first trip to the United States, Joseph Beuys is inspired by a traumatic event from American culture: representing a figure oscillating between torturer and victim, he thus proposes - as he had done before in Germany - a form of social therapy founded on the notion of “historical reactivation”.

Philippe Bettinelli,
Translated by Anna Knight