Balkan Rhapsodies: # 1-78 - Observations, Encounters and

  Afterthoughts on Serbia and Kosovo

   a film by Jeff Silva

   Thursday, May 24, 2007, 7 pm

   admission free: suggested donation $335-$3310

Balkan Rhapsodies is an episodic documentary poem that weaves together a mosaic of encounters, observations and reflections from my travels through war-torn Serbia and Kosovo. The formal structure of the video is inspired by the fragmentary and episodic framework of rhapsodic literature and music to echo the complexity of representing history, fragmented personal memory and the reality of life in Former Yugoslavia. I was the first American allowed into Serbia after the NATO bombings in June of 1999 and the filming I did while there makes up the heart of the project. I returned back to the Balkans later again in 2000 and a final time in 2005. Balkan Rhapsodies weaves together an array of these visual and sound fragments, moving between intimate verité footage, testimonials from survivors, performances, humorous musical interludes, commentaries from Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and appropriated TV and web footage. The collection of detritus and shards of memories, evidence, and experiences creates an accumulated viewing experience that resonates with political and social issues into our present day.

   

Bio: Jeff Silva is an artist, teacher and curator living in Somerville. Jeff currently teaches experimental and ethnographic
filmmaking at Harvard University and a History of Documentary at Emerson College. Prior to teaching he worked professionally as a
Multi-Media producer at MIT making science and educational videos. He is also the co-founder and co-curator of the award winning Balagan
Experimental Film Series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Over the past ten years, Jeff has developed a diverse body of work from multi-
channel installations to films and experimental documentaries. His projects, in whatever formal strategy they employ, always tend to
challenge boundaries and conventions, whether it be spatial, temporal, cinematic, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, personal or
political. His usage of the moving-image in his work is a vehicle for exploring political ambiguity, paradox and corporeality. At the
core of his work is the nuanced and studied exploration of complex relationships between subject, artist and spectator. His work
strives to create a physical and intellectual dialogue with the viewer, implicating them in the final process of meaning making.