print   back The Houses That Are Left 51 :00, 1991 (also 28 minute broadcast version, 1990 & The Houses That Are Left (trailer) 1989, see below) The Houses That Are Left is a story of mortality, friendship, revenge, murder and the supernatural, as two friends come together to try to figure out how to live, while being besieged by malignant messages from the dead. While the living are rendered passive by their fear that something bad could happen to them, the dead, who no long can have anything happen to them at all, strive to regain their ability to act through the only tool available to them, their television. Juxtaposing black-and-white film with color video, and fusing narrative elements of drama, comedy and documentary, Silver provides a structure that allows for a plurality of voices to speak: two women who were childhood friends, people on the street who are interviewed for "market research," and the observations of dead people who watch the living on television monitors. Truth and fiction are blurred as the dead communicate with the living and real people are interviewed by fictional characters. Best Narrative Film, Atlanta Film & Video Festival Best Narrative, Australia International Video Festival "Silver is one of the foremost figures in a younger generation of American videomakers coming to prominence with a series of works which combine visual and formal experimentation with a provocative narrative punch. The Houses That Are Left rates as her most ambitious project to date, and also presents one of the most intriguing independent tapes to come out of the United States in the last few years. Structured as a sort of post-modern mystery story (that encompasses everything from murder to market research, from sexuality to the supernatural), it constructs a shifting narrative framework in which not only its characters but also the viewer is constantly having to sift out what is fiction from what is truth...to finally arrive at its powerful and perceptive dissection of modern America: anxious, narcissistic, consumed by media images." Steven Bode, London Film Festival written, directed, edited by Shelly Silver director of photography John Kraus interview photography Kim Higgins music composed/performed by Roy Nathanson, Curtis Fowlkes, E.J. Rodriguez with Judy Blazer, Maggie Low, Kate Valk , Quinn Raymond, Bill Raymond, Doug Barron, Larry Maxwell, Sam Coppola, Isa Thomas art director Jacqui Arnot production manager Adam Brightman, Jennifer Fong funded in part by The New York State Council on the Arts The Checkerboard Foundation The National Endowment for the Arts New Television selected screenings The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Nagoya Art Museum, Japan; Centre For Contemporary Art, Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland; Cologne Kunstverein, Germany; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Video Art After Video Art, Goethe Memorial Museum, Tokyo, Japan; St. Gervais Video Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; The Exploding Valentine, Theater Am Turm, Frankfurt, Germany; Channels for A Changing TV, Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; The London Film Festival; The Self & American Video Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Cologne Kunstverein, Germany; Video Viewpoints, Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Germany; At the Edge of the World, Film & Video Umbrella (travelling) selected broadcasts New Television, WGBH/Boston, WNET/New York; Other Cinema, Channel 2, Poland; RTE Television, Ireland The Houses That Are Left (trailer) 1989, 6:42 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. Electronic Intermix Catalogue page top