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Homage Shelly Silver 2014
37 Stories About Leaving Home Shelly Silver

An intimate portrait of a group of Japanese women between the ages of 15 and 82. They talk about their lives, what separates and unites daughters, mothers and grandmothers.

37 Stories About Leaving Home

Documentary Film
USA
1996
52 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Shelly Silver
Music
Lefdup & Lefdup
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver, Daiho Tsuruoko
Script
Shelly Silver
Sound
Bill Seery, Mercer Street Sound
An intimate portrait of a group of Japanese women between the ages of 15 and 82. They talk about their lives, what separates and unites daughters, mothers and grandmothers, and how each of them at different times experienced the act of stepping out into the world and society. A complex web of childhood memories, banalities and a magical and cruel Japanese folk tale about a mother’s search for her daughter, who was abducted by a monster on the eve of her wedding.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
5 Lessons and 9 Questions About Chinatown Shelly Silver

“You live somewhere, walk down the same street fifty, a hundred, ten thousand times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE ..."

5 Lessons and 9 Questions About Chinatown

Documentary Film
USA
2009
10 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Karin Chien
Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver
Script
Shelly Silver
Sound
Ian Stynes, Great City Productions
“You live somewhere, walk down the same street fifty, a hundred, ten thousand times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen.
A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself, 'What used to be there?' You are only vaguely aware of the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops.
10 square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons. Chinatown.” (Shelly Silver)
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
Former East/Former West Shelly Silver

In this lively, surprisingly frank and occasionally disturbing film, the certainty that there was something like a shared, let alone general identity in the new Germany of the early 1990s.

Former East/Former West

Documentary Film
USA
1994
62 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver
Hundreds of encounters. More or less long-winded statements by passers-by. In this lively, surprisingly frank and occasionally disturbing film, the certainty that there was something like a shared, let alone general identity in the new Germany of the early 1990s, when things grew together that (maybe did not after all) belonged together, is gradually shattered. What we see and hear instead is a many-voiced and stubborn chorus of voices who sound completely at odds with the well-formed structure of representative language.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
In Complete World Shelly Silver

Pedestrians and what they have to say. In the simple disguise of a political poll, the participants’ answers are correlated with rather wide-reaching existential reflections.

In Complete World

Documentary Film
USA
2008
53 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
House Productions
Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver, Tommy Button, Emma Craig
Script
Shelly Silver
Pedestrians and what they have to say. In the simple disguise of a political poll, the participants’ answers are correlated with rather wide-reaching existential reflections. The red thread in this work is the tension between individual and collective responsibility. The individual statements appear more and more like voices in a polyphonic social choir or fragments of a piece of poetry.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
Things I Forget to Tell Myself Shelly Silver

A poetic investigation of how views of a city are manufactured. There is no singular continuous central flow but rather a collection of impressions that arrange themselves in hierarchical order, with or without our help.

Things I Forget to Tell Myself

Documentary Film
USA
1989
2 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
Michael Halper, Rebo Studio
Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Abby Levine, Shelly Silver, Rick Wright
Editor
Shelly Silver
Script
Shelly Silver
Sound
Rick Wright
A poetic investigation of how views of a city are manufactured. There is no singular continuous central flow but rather a collection of impressions that arrange themselves in hierarchical order, with or without our help; a mental automatism very much emphasised and brought to our awareness by hands covering parts of the images. The video is a montage of written, graphic and audio particles of reality and meaning that produce a rhythmic interplay of concealment and revelation.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
Touch Shelly Silver

After decades of absence, an elderly Chinese man returns to his old neighbourhood (New York, Chinatown) to take care of his dying mother.

Touch

Documentary Film
USA
2013
68 minutes
Subtitles: 
English

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
House Productions
Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver, Cassandra Guan
Script
Shelly Silver
Sound
Bill Seery, Mercer Media
Speaker
Lu Yu
After decades of absence, an elderly Chinese man returns to his old neighbourhood (New York, Chinatown) to take care of his dying mother. The man is a fictitious character: the narrator who is also part of his own narrative. We neither see him nor do we ever learn his name. He is a homosexual and calls himself the librarian of the lives that play out around him. He collects and stores impressions – thanks to which he affirms his own self. A meditative video diary in the guise of an elaborate network of everyday research, intimate confessions, stolen moments, secret desire. Chris Marker meets Wong Kar-wai.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
We Shelly Silver

The split screen shots of the erect penis of a masturbating man (right) and a hectic street scene (left) show two neutral circumstances.

We

Documentary Film
USA
1990
4 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Shelly Silver
Music
Floating Pad, Henry Mancini
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver
The split screen shots of the erect penis of a masturbating man (right) and a hectic street scene (left) show two neutral circumstances. What we read into them above and beyond this is imputation, interpretation, imagination. In addition, there is a text scrolling horizontally across both halves of the image: quotes from Thomas Bernhard’s novel “Correction”.
Ralph Eue
Homage Shelly Silver 2014
What I'm Looking For Shelly Silver

Desire, time and control are the three themes Shelly Silver lists as the background of this work. For the artist, they crystalise in the act of taking a photo.

What I'm Looking For

Documentary Film
USA
2004
15 minutes
Subtitles: 
No

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Producer
House Productions
Director
Shelly Silver
Cinematographer
Shelly Silver
Editor
Shelly Silver
Script
Shelly Silver
Sound
William Seery, Mercer Media
Speaker
Katrín Sigurðardóttir
Desire, time and control are the three themes Shelly Silver lists as the background of this work. For the artist, they crystalise in the act of taking a photo: a work about the desire of the photographer and that of the person photographed. Silver put an ad on an Internet dating site: “I’m looking for people who would like to be photographed in public, revealing something of themselves.”
Ralph Eue