イメージフォーラム・フェスティバル 2018

This Film

Shelly SILVER

music: Arnold DREYBLATT / 16mm / 7min. / 2018 / USA, Germany

This film was made for a project to test how long a film would last under a hot and humid environment, where seemingly casually filmed scenery becomes the irreplaceable the second it passes through the lens.

Turn

Shelly SILVER

16mm / 4min. / 2018 / USA, Germany

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.

***This Film and Turn were commissioned by the Arsenal and Film Feld Forschung for a particular future. A copy of each film will be placed in a heated terrarium to track the films demise. For This Film, printed on polyester, it may mean accelerated fading from red to sunset orange to a hazy pastel. For Turn, printed on volatile acetate, the change will be quicker and more dramatic as it falls victim to vinegar syndrome. Acetic acid will be released, the base will shrink and buckle, the image will decompose. Through off-gassing, this seemingly stable spool of triacetate will be in a state of constant flux. It will also have the ability to infect others of its kind.

5 Lessons & 9 Questions About Chinatown

Shelly SILVER

digital / 10min. / 2009 / USA

You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 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.

A Strange New Beauty

Shelly SILVER

digital / 51min. / 2017 / USA

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. Charlotte Selb, Revue 24 Images