SHELLY SILVER
ARTIST, FILMMAKER, and EDUCATOR
“To watch a film by Silver is to lose yourself in a world of ideas, images, and questions about how we live.” Between Worlds, A Profile of Shelly Silver, Kenny Berkowitz
Girls | Museum
2020, 71 min
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.
Turn
2018, 04:42 min
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.
exceptional happenings
2008, 3 monitors, 3 dvds, 17 minute loop
Texts | Images | Video
"Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped here." –– Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
exceptional happenings is a seventeen minute, three-channel video installation bridging text and image, movie and novel, and the American zeitgeist of the 20th and 21st century.Utilizing eight films and the eight literary works they are based on, the installation brings together 20th century ruminations on class, race, gender, violence and poverty. These categories are still with us in the beginning of the 21st century, though perhaps we talk, write and film them differently now (if at all) than we once did.
including texts and moving images from the books/films:
In Cold Blood, A Member of the Wedding, Ship of Fools, The Godfather, Goodbye Columbus, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Swimmer, Strangers on a Train.
What I'm Looking For
projector/monitor, documentation, framed photos
2004, 15 min
Texts | Images | Video
A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: 'I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...'
What I'm Looking For documents this adventure; the connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.
37 Stories About Leaving Home
1996, in Japanese & English, 52 minutes
Texts | Images | Video
In this award winning documentary, Silver presents an intimate portrait of a group of Japanese women ranging in age from 15 to 82, talking about their lives, families and society. In these stories one can begin to see, from very personal and individual perspectives, the societal changes that have occurred over the last three generations for women in Japan.
"Subtle and insightful...highlighting the competing demands of tradition and personal freedom. Silver presents a remarkable portrait of a culture about to experience seismic social change." –– Steven Bode, National Film Theatre, London
"A beautiful film." –– Margarethe von Trotta
a tiny place that is hard to touch
触れがたき小さな場所
2019, 38:52 min
Texts | Images | Video
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.
FOR MORE ABOUT SILVER:
Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching: 3, Shelly Silver, Places Journal, April 2020.
Looking and Being Looked At: Shelly Silver & Claire Barliant, Charles Traub and Adam Bell, eds. Vision Anew, The Lens & Screen Arts, University of California Press, 2015.
Between Worlds, A Profile of Shelly Silver, Kenny Berkowitz, AAP News, Issuu, Fall 2015.
In the Studio, Interview with Shelly Silver, Steel Stillman, Art in America, April, 2015.
Shelly Silver at Slought Foundation, Annette Monnier, ArtNews, March, 2015 (pdf).
Stories, Cities, Makeshift Structures, Shelly Silver at Slought, Kelsey Halliday Johnson, Title Magazine, March, 2015 (pdf).
Spectateurs de Spectateurs : Les Attentions Génératives de Shelly Silver, Viewers of Viewers : Shelly Silver's Generative Attentions, Frances Richard, Catalogue, Cinéma du Réel, March, 2015 (French first, scroll down for English).
Retrospective Shelly Silver, Trouble dans les Genres, Olivia Cooper Hadjian, de ligne/en ligne, Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou, January-March, 2015 (English pdf).
Trois questions à Maria Bonsanti, Arlette Alliguié, de ligne/en ligne, Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou, January-March, 2015 (English pdf).
Shelly Silver v meziprostoru, Andrea Pruchova, Cinepur, Prague, Czech Republic, March, 2014.
Écriture/Image: Shelly Silver, Interview with Stephen Sarrazin, Mondes du Cinema 4, LettMotif, Paris, France, 2013.
What I Know About Penises, Shelly Silver, onestar press, 2012.
The Time of Us, Nicole Wolf, Argos Magazine, January-March, 2011.
Three Questions for Shelly Silver, Interview with John Menick, Blog: Art, film prose & politics, November, 2008.
Animalische Qualitatäten, Madeleine Bernstorff, taz, Germany, September 1, 2006.
Things I forget to tell myself: Oedipus interruptus, Shelly Silver's Video Work, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Catalogue: 12th Biennial of Moving Image, Geneva, Switzerland, October, 2007 (download).
Dialogue: the work of Shelly Silver, Ann Huber-Sigwart, (Eco)Logical, n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, volume 9, 2002.
Zoo, William Horrigan, Shelly Silver: Video, Musee de l'art et de l'histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2001 (catalogue).
The Stories that are Left, Stephen Sarrazin, Shelly Silver: Video, Musee de l'art et de l'histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2001 (catalogue).
Video Parables, Sally Berger, Shelly Silver: Video, Musee de l'art et de l'histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2001 (catalogue).
