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Small Lies, Big Truth

Shelly Silver

1999 00:18:48 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

In turns funny, disturbing, and glisteningly sensual, small lies, Big Truth is a tape about love, relationships, and the joy and banality of sex in the late 20th Century. It also touches on such issues as morality, voyeurism, nature vs. culture, and power, as eight people read fragments from the testimony of William Jefferson Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky, as published in the Starr Report.

These four couples include an older man and a younger woman (Bill Raymond and Tracy Leipold), an older woman and a younger man (Joan Jonas and Ken Kobland), an older man and a younger man (Rodney Evans and David Watson), a younger woman and an older woman (Simin Farkhondeh and Kathy High).

Quoting from the established genres of experimental, documentary, and fiction film and television, Shelly Silver’s work is funny, poetic and formally beautiful, seducing the viewer into pondering such difficult issues as the cracks in our most common assumptions, the impossibility of a shared language, and the ambivalent and yet overwhelming need to belong—to a family, a nation, a gender, an ideology. Exploring the psychology of public and private space, the ambivalence inherent in familial and societal relations and the seduction and repulsion of voyeurism, Silver’s work elicits equal amounts of pleasure and discomfort.