Shelly Silver
b. 1957
“To watch the moving-image art of Shelly Silver is to understand that, among other messy civic values on which democracies rely—free access to public space, for instance, and a willingness to transgress comfort zones⎯democracy relies on empathy. And empathy relies on fantasy, and fantasy is always partial, entwined with misperception, unpredictable, perverse. “Being-for-others,” in Silver’s feminist sense, amounts less to the alienating instrumentalization of the individual by a masterful observer, and more to the feeling that civic space is a matrix of hallways, doorways, rooms and streets, glimpses and confrontations, in which to see is to acknowledge and co-create, because everyone is looking all the time. Silver has been making films since 1980. She works with actors and non-actors alike, and has interviewed extensively on the streets of Berlin, Tokyo, New York; she has a writer’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of unrehearsed speech, and a painterly eye for real-world color. Monologue, voiceover, and onscreen text interweave in her collaged narratives, and the oneiric precision of her editing allows the long take to shatter into split screens, to fold in time to repeat itself fr…
Films