The Houses That Are Left (Trailer)

1989, 6:42 min, b&w and color, sound

In this compelling "trailer," Silver constructs an evocative and elusive montage of disjunctive narrative threads — glimpsed images, dramatic snippets of sound and provocative fragments of text — in a pastiche of stylized black-and-white film and color video verite. Documentary? Fiction? Silver builds a mesmerizing, staccato rhythm of light and dark, sound and silence, text and image: brief bursts of cinematic orchestration and sound effects; gestures and dialogue of "characters" from a fictional melodrama, abbreviated answers to "people-in-the-street" interview questions. Questions of race, age and marital status converge with self-descriptions in an enigmatic inquiry into contemporary identity, constructed from the roles and narrative conventions of cinema and television.

Writer/Director: Shelly Silver. With: Judy Blazer, Maggie Low, Doug Barron, Larry Maxwell, Felice Neals, Ted Rebich, Talph Tachuk. Director of Photography: John Kraus. Interview Photography: Kim Higgins. Music: Gustav Mahler.

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1986-90, 32 min, color, sound