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suicide

Shelly Silver

2003 01:10:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3DV video
Tags:
Death and Dying, Expedition/Travel, Film or Videomaking, Surveillance, Mental Landscape

Description

suicide is 70 packed minutes of a fictional filmmaker's crazed ruminations on travel, family history, death and sex as she traverses a world of malls, airports and train stations, chronicling her fiercely hopeful search for a reason to continue living.

Shot to resemble a personal diary film, and starring the director herself as the imaginary filmmaker heroine, suicide is edgy, dark and funny; an audacious act of flirting with the revelatory autobiographical. It is a wild ride, as the heroine slips ever further into the shadow areas between the real and the imagined....

"Subverts the norms of both travelogue and video diary." --A.O. Scott, The New York Times 

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.