Suicide shares aspects of the travelogue and the visual essay, even as it probes the boundaries of first-person narrative storytelling. Lush with haunting, melancholy imagery, this elusive story of a woman adrift in an alienating cultural landscape is described by Silver as a "feature-length narrative disguised as a personal video journal... It was shot almost entirely in public spaces, spaces of transit, commerce or tourism."
"I did the shooting editing and writing at the same time and the film has a feeling of being constantly in a state of being built, the story changing depending on what the fictional film-maker saw that day. Working this way afforded me the ability to at times be lead by the images filmed that day, by the logic of the story, or by the increasingly vocal demands of my main character Amanda."
"Amanda suffers from an ability to direct her desire into the normative paths of home, job, family, relationships that would allow her to connect and live socially. These paths are blocked, so that her desire must take other, more circuitous, anarchic and fantastic directions, exploding almost indiscriminately onto everyone and everything around her. This is of course a sad state of affairs for Amanda, but the film visually and aurally thrives based on this dilemma, as this desire bounces everywhere else, onto everything she hears (we hear) and she sees (we see). This is apparent in the super-colorful overstuffed images of Osaka, moist eyes staring down suggestively from gargantuan billboards, small hairs on the edge of a man's ear, waving gently in the wind."
Producers: House Productions, Oshikuma Films. Actor: Shelly Silver. Researchers: Nanako Kurihara, Japan; Christa Bluemlinger, Europe. Post-Production Consultants: Mary Patierno, Ed Bowes, Kathy High. Technical Consultant: Jeremy Chien. Sound Mix: Bill Seery, Mercer Media. Music: G.B. Pergolesi, Utada Hiraku, Morning Musume, To Rococo Rot, Azuquita & Los Jubilados. Funded in part by Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts.