Susan Hiller "The Last Silent Movie"

Anthology Film Archives

poster for Susan Hiller "The Last Silent Movie"

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An old man confronts us with some truths about language. The strangeness of his voice merges with the buzzing and humming artifacts of an archaic recording mechanism. A young girl repeats words she is trying to memorize in what sounds like French. Several men exuberantly chant fragments of a creation myth. Next, an elderly woman tells a story of jealousy and murder to an appreciative listener. Then a gruff voice enquires about fishing conditions ...

The Last Silent Movie opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening. The work sets free some of the ghosts and spectres haunting the unacknowledged unheimlich of sound recording which allows us to hear the words and voices of people mostly now dead in The Last Silent Movie, some of them sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some of them, directly or indirectly, accuse us, the listeners, of injustice.

“There aren't many artists whose every new work you would want to see and Hiller is one of them.”
Laura Cummings, The Observer, 2008

“Susan Hiller amplifies archived voices speaking in near-extinct languages, translations of which appear on a screen slung from the ceiling. It is a cinema of the unseen and the no-longer heard. There are snatches of song and folk myth, exhortations and lamentations, last voices no one can understand speaking languages in which no new thing will ever again be said.”
Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 2008

Media

Schedule

November 06, 2008 from 18:00 to 19:00

Artist(s)

Susan Hiller

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