In The Box: small lies, Big Truth

Produced with the support of the Wexner Center’s Film/ Video Studio, Shelly Silver’s small lies, Big Truth is a darkly humorous reminder of the cyclical nature of politics and history that transports viewers back to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the 1998 Grand Jury testimony of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Multiple voices (including those of artists Joan Jonas, Kathy High, and Rodney Evans) read lines from the testimony over lush Super 8 footage of zoo animals. The narrators’ shifting voices, pronouns, and genders, juxtaposed with images of captive animals, highlight still-pertinent issues of morality, power, and voyeurism in contemporary culture. Film/Video Studio Curator Jennifer Lange sat down with Silver to discuss her film. 

What was it that drew you to lawyer Ken Starr's report on his investigation of Clinton, used to support his impeachment, and why did you structure/restructure the document in this way, with multiple voices (of different ages and genders) representing the voices of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky?
I moved back from Europe in the summer of 1998, just as Clinton’s impeachment was picking up steam. I can remember one sticky day taking the D train to Coney Island, and opening the special pullout section of the New York Times containing excerpts (the juiciest bits) from the Starr report. I’m a New Yorker, and it was the first time I saw the word “masturbate,” among other words and acts, used in the “family-oriented” New York Times, let alone in reference to the current president. There, on this sultry train, I read “and then he masturbated into the bathroom sink,” looking around the subway car to see if anyone knew the illicit quality of what I was reading. 

I was struck by the distinct language of the two protagonists, one intent on revealing, the other on concealing. Lewinsky would answer beyond the scope of each quest-ion. Offering the number of buttons on the blue, semen-stained dress she wore during their last encounter. No one could have possibly asked about a certain cigar, including what was done and not done with it. She volunteered this vibrant story of where it had been inserted and by who[m]. 

Clinton instead used a spare, controlled language—treating each word as a shape-shifting object to be examined and then questioned. His answers pointed out the impossibility of tethering a specific meaning to even the simplest of words: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” He was defending himself, after all, from an accusation of perjury. 

There's an unsettling disconnect between what we see onscreen and what we hear. Where did the idea of the visuals originate?
I never considered using images of the protagonists; if I had, the round robin game of shifting personal pronouns wouldn’t have made sense. The choice of using animals was an intuitive one. I filmed them, not in their “natural” setting, but rather in the restrictive setting of zoos, where it’s the animal’s job to be looked at. I forget how many zoos I filmed at, but they were in several continents. 

I shot in Super 8, the medium of personal home movies, used to film children and enshrine family memories. I find S-8 sensual due to the texture of the grain and slowing the footage down made it more so. Editing for rhythm and movement, sound and image rubbed up against each other in different ways, sometimes with a strong bond between word and picture, at other times [with] the two drift[ing] apart. 

How do you think about the work 20 years later?
I realize that many of the things I like about the film are less logical and tangible—its shadow[y] quality, this morass of official language and sensuality and sex and twitching and licking and pacing. The aching desire and depression of the film. Its texture, its rhythm and claustrophobia. Its sadness, its surprise intimacies, its soft pastel colors. Louis Armstrong singing [in the soundtrack] from the bottom of an abyss of other times. A more open time. The web of direct and indirect looks of the visual protagonists—the hazy gaze of the breastfeeding polar bear, the seal stealing a microsecond look at the camera. The pleasure of the voices, my friends, now 20 years older. And that sinking feeling throughout, of what’s turned into the continued slow-motion car crash we’re living through... just one of those things.