Shelly Silver

The film consists of testimonials from fourteen individuals representing average New Yorkers talking about their daily lives. The film mimics the documentary genre, but at the end of the film, the credits reveal that all fourteen subjects are actors reading from a script written by Silver.[4]

Consisting of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, this documentary is a portrait of citizen attitudes about what it means to be German at that particular moment in history.[5]

Silver blends interviews with Japanese women describing their lives with a folktale of a young woman who is stolen by an Oni who is later saved by her mother.[6]

In this work Silver pairs audio of narrators (four couples) reading the testimonials of Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton as published in the Starr Report with found footage of zoo animals.[7]

This feature-length fictional film follows a filmmaker through malls, airports, and train stations in Central America, Asia, and Europe as she searches for a reason to live. The role of the filmmaker is played by Silver herself.[8]

A series of photographs representing the results of a request posted to an online dating service: “I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...”[9]

Silver constructs the fictional story of a gay man who has returned to New York after fifty years to care for his dying mother. The narration of the film is an essay told from the man’s point of a view, an amalgam of research and interviews.[10]

A disturbing intrusion into the luxurious homes of Silicon Valley. Using an aggressive soundtrack and a full frame often fractured into small rectangles covered by text, Silver reveals a deafening violence behind the glittering beauty and deceptively calm of this suburban landscape. There is no human presence, but the homes seem to contain a memory of disturbing events, to bear the traces of a savagery just offscreen.[11]

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven né Plotz, was an unsung member of the Dada Movement. A poet, artist, runaway, and all around public provocateur, she actively did not fit into her historical moment, and like most misfits, suffered for it. Some researchers believe that the Baroness was the artist behind Fountain, the ready-made urinal attributed to Marcel Duchamp.[12]

Details of human bodies and animals in a peri-urban environment - dancing and motionless, alive and dead. Like her ambivalent plans, as beautiful as they are sharp, the visual poem composed by Shelly Silver shows the fragility of beings in the very expression of their vitality, the pulse and the possibility of its cessation. (Charlotte Garson)[13]

In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial? A shying away from? An admission of guilt or not caring? A disappearing act? In 2017 on the streets of Berlin, twenty-three women, friends and passersby, reverse Seberg’s action.[14]

Filming is alchemy; preserving, seeing, devouring, cutting. Chopping the flow of images with a push of a button. It privileges a solitary unseen protagonist, choosing this over that and then that, it eats anything, not everything,

The world hacked into fragments, jumps, frames. Kidnapped buildings gestures people animals happening now, again now, again now. The displacement of what was once to what is now seen carries the odor of end, regardless of the incessant movement of one frame to the next, a machine forcing the celluloid frames forced to run, jump, trip, turning it all into a sad slapstick -- slapstick also embodies heartbreak.[15]

An imaginary room resembling a swimming pool. An actual body of water. Sea creatures carried by the wind. Plastic. A dance film that leaves us primarily in the dark. A dance score for the choreographer Joanna Kotze.[16]

In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an American woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The American woman is presumptuous in her knowledge of Japan; the Japanese woman suffers from a self-professed excess of critical distance. They grate, fight, and crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise. This neighborhood has already known devastation, having been wiped out the night of March 9th, 1945, by American bombs.

The third protagonist is the Tatekawa itself, the canal covered by an elevated highway that runs past the translator’s apartment, which gives the neighborhood its name. Reflecting back the concrete world in distorted patterns of blue, green or glittering black, the Tatekawa transports a shifting procession of birds, shoes, condoms, crabs, plastic bags, flowers, big fish, little fish, death, life.[17]

Girls | Museum is a voyage through the historical art collection of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig/MdbK, guided by the expertise and insights of a group of girls, ages 7 to 19. Moving from painting to painting, century to century, they tell us what they see.[18]