Her Royal Majesty Parts 1 & 2:
The Queen of Hearts
The Queen of Diamonds
Suzie Silver
Video, 3:45, 2002

Through the manipulation of surface, color, composition, and rhythm of sound and image, Her Royal Majesty plays with spectacles of imaginary histories and mythologies of stardom. There is something poignant (the price women pay for power), and at the same time hilarious (costumes, sets, campy acting), about Hollywood’s 1930’s movies about “historical” queens. These are the first two parts of a four-part suite. The four films in the suite are Cleopatra (1934), Queen Christina (1933), Scarlet Empress (1934), and Marie Antoinette (1938).

Peggy Love 101
Suzie Silver
Video, 2:40, 2001

Love is an obsession. Pop culture is filled with love songs. What can the musical expression of the word “love” mean? Here, one of the great pop vocalists of the twentieth century, Peggy Lee, sings us some clues.

Untitled No. 1: A Haralez Project
Produced by Haralez, the collaborative team of Elizabeth Monoian and Suzie Silver
Video, 15:00, 2001

Untitled No. 1 is an experimental video project based on a series of renegade performance videos. It fuses noise, video, and performance using a method that calls into question our relationships to time, history, and memory. Haralez’ repetitive, seemingly futile and potentially unending actions merge with an electronic soundscape, which contextualizes the images narratively to expand the historical and cultural framework. The noise consists of sound effects and music that establish a subconscious narration.

Mistakes and Lies Part II
Mary Ellen Carroll and Suzie Silver
Video, 2001

A New York City casting call becomes an exploration of desire and identity. Words may not always get at the truth but the body seldom lies.

The Look of Love:

Adventure into glamour through cheesy effects. The viewer bears witness to the clamorous projections of the protagonist's fantasy world. And while you're at it, name those stars!

An experimental video and audio collage in four acts. Performing in various guises, Suzie Silver embarks on a quest for the magnificence - and the horror - of desire and pleasure.

FREEBIRD

Suzie Silver
Video, 1993

Silver directs and performs all the roles in this raucous and hilarious music video rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s "Freebird", the infamous Southern rock anthem for an entire generation of 1970s male youth. In this spoof of straight mass culture, Silver flips ironically between roles; from a lesbian proudly proclaiming her sexuality at the Academy Awards, to an in-concert Coors-drinking Ronnie Van Zant, and, finally, to a black-lace lesbian lounge swinger celebrating the wild, colorful world of “out” visibility. Silver draws upon an amazing array of found footage and special effects to bend genders and genres with spectacular visual delight.

A Spy (Hester Reeve Does The Doors)

Hester Reeve and Suzie Silver
Video, 4:35, 1991

“A Spy” is a gender-bending and thought-provoking mixture of pure visual pleasure with humorous and unsettling undercurrents. As Reeve lip-syncs to a Doors' song (“I am a spy in the house of love. I know the dream that you're dreaming of, I know your deepest secret fear...”), we see a new manifestation of Jesus walking in a video field of pulsing rainbows, amoebic forms, and B-movie girls in black panties—suggesting the desires we hide from ourselves and others.

The video is based on a performance created and performed by Hester Reeve, March 8 & 9, 1991 at Club Lower Links, Chicago, for the program, Bait and Switch (organized by Iris Moore and Suzie Silver).

Peccatum Mutum:

A convent fantasy, the kind common among veterans of Catholic girls schools is acted out in a series of stylized vignettes. The repressed returns, leading to forbidden thoughts, restless nights, meaningful glances, confessions, ardent embraces – and worse.