With the artist

(Total running time: 51:00 min)

Something Happened, 2007, 7:00 min
The film does not take up the plain literary style of Joseph Heller's novel, nor does it follow its plot literatim. By preparing their secure death in front of the camera, the two unnamed protagonists ghoulishly undermine the fictional plotline.

Les Ruissellements du Diable, 2008, 10:30 min
A video based on a story by Julio Cort?zar: A man takes a photo in the park and discovers it is more vivid than his own life. This basic situation unfolds into a unique philosophical tale that combines explicit images with oriental music, stretching the boundaries of manhood and femininity.

The Victim, 2006, 5:00 min
The Victim exploits one film genre after another. Melodrama, thriller, family series, and soap opera all figure in a story that links five characters. Relationships are revealed at breathtaking speed, only to shift and change the next instant. The nature of the characters and their function within the narrative fragments are in constant flux.
Alternating between choral Sprechgesang (spoken song) and duets, entrances follow exits, exposition follows faux denouement, and confession follows morality until such confusion reigns that not even the characters themselves seem to know what game they are playing: perhaps a drama of perfectly ordinary insanity in the mirror of fiction.

Dreamtalk, 2005, 11:00 min
Dreamtalk presents an ironic love triangle involving a couple and their male friend. The friend desires the girl, but she is loyal to her boyfriend, who appears to be obsessed with Sandra, a character on a TV reality-show. The characters set themselves against each other, competing.

2/6/04 (from "The Dates Series"), 2004, 6:00 min
The man speaks German with a French accent; the woman speaks French with a German accent. The sequences are randomly put, and the atmosphere is romantic.
The man recalls his beloved walking in a deserted house. Remembering their moments, his memories gradually turn from romantic to pornographic, while the video style remains unchanged.

Der Spiegel, 2007, 5:00 min
One shot describes the story of a woman waiting for a young man to save her from her loneliness. The camera moves endlessly in the figure eight. The choir follows the woman's discoveries and adventures, reaching moral collapse.

Nightmare, 2007, 6:00 min
A man dreams that he is awake, hearing his flatmate talking about him. He dreams that he wants her, but she rejects him. When he wakes up, he kills his flatmate and then goes back to sleep. In his sleep, he dreams that she is still alive, and kills her again.

On Keren Cytter's Works
Sari Golan

Keren Cytter's works transpire on the borderline between video art and experimental cinema. She perceives video as a vehicle enabling exploration of the boundaries of the moving image in visual as well as contextual terms. Her works introduce questions about the modi operandi of television, cinema, and visual art, examining the manipulations performed by these media in the representation of reality.

Cytter's films delve into ordinary life and human conduct within the everyday. The "drama" in the plot always occurs as a distinctive radicalization of reality. The major themes addressed in her works are the materials from which relationships are made, namely love, hate, loss, desire, and friendship. She focuses on the human figure by perusing various relationships and interpersonal interactions whose complexity gradually increases; in some instances the connection between the figures is totally unclear.

Cytter writes all the monologues and dialogues in her works. The script as a whole, and the dialogues in particular, often function as an independent text verging on poetry or prose, forming the predominant part of the work. While their language is literary and florid, the themes are distinctively low, as if extracted from a soap opera. The tension between the higher register in text and the lower image generates a sense of melodrama characteristic to her works. Furthermore, the high, over-poetic language reinforces the artificiality of the film's making, generating a further distancing from reality. Another important linguistic emphasis is the language blend. Different films are made in different languages, such as English, Hebrew, German, French, etc. Even within a single film, different figures may speak to one another in different languages. The use of different languages is often intended to illustrate disputes and misunderstandings, which frequently originate in interpersonal relations. Furthermore, the blending signifies a quintessential lack of identity and ongoing fluidity in the defining mold of an individual or of human conduct.

Cytter's work oscillates between various manifestations of cinematic reality and actual reality. Ostensibly, the behind-the-scenes reality of the film's production appears to get out of control, as the figures continue in their desperate attempt to adapt themselves to the script or obey some predetermined logic. This "show" of lack of control is totally false, since every "error" or instance of "incontrol" is meticulously planned. At times it appears as though Cytter's actors intentionally display "bad acting" and even appear lost in the absence of a clear foothold in the figure and its characteristics. The result is a dual move confronting the viewer with the work's artificiality, on the one hand, and a reality where a person is lost with no typical shape or form, on the other.

Repetition is another key feature of Cytter's works. It occurs on the level of both text and image. Certain expressions are articulated more than once, certain shots recur, yet the plot seems to progress nevertheless. Repetition also occurs in various ways in works which are not "looped" by definition. The repetition generates the illusion of a dream where it is unclear whether the scene before us repeats or continues a previous scene.

Another blurring of the boundaries of the plot occurs in the relations between addresser and addressee. It is unclear who the speaker is even when the figure recites monologues written in first person. Like a man reading a novel with a first person narrative, we are offered glimpses into the figures' mind and thoughts as we watch them play in a certain way, while simultaneously hearing their contradictory thoughts in voice-over.

The confusion of roles in Cytter's work applies to the viewer's part as well. Persistently re-defining their role, the film sometimes enables viewers to slip into a cinematic illusion where only their consciousness looks through the window onto another reality; subsequently, however, the figures turn directly to the camera, thus deconstructing the classical cinematic illusion. The lack of illusion introduces, inter alia, the question, whether the viewers wish to take part in the scene, or whether they merely want to penetrate a reality not their own and function as voyeurs. Thus, the viewers cannot avoid the questions arising as to the act of photography and the artificial representation of reality in visual art and in the cinema.

One of the dominant points of view, through which Cytter often addresses relationships and interpersonal communication, is the performative practice of gender.1 This practice raises questions about the essence of gender roles derived from "playing a woman" or "playing a man." In earlier works the gender roles were basic, as in The Friends Series (2001) which is a collection of short films, each documenting a different pair and their interpersonal dynamics. This practice was elaborated in The Dates Series (2004) which is a type of video-diary covering a period of several months in 2004. Similarly, in Something Happened (2007), introducing an intricate relationship rife with role reversals, this practice is clearly discernible, culminating in The Mirror (2007) which appears as a documentation of a play or a performance saturated with sexuality and radicalized gender roles. Cytter explores prevalent gender clich?s by perusing the validity of "female" and "male" roles. This performativity emerges in her works in various manners, among others also in the familial unit, as in The Family (2002) which criticizes the normative gender and family roles in society, while humorously employing Freudian theories.

In some respects one may say that Cytter's works engage in the individual's relationship with the public and with social and cultural clich?s. They elicit the feeling that every represented social and cultural behavioral pattern reflects some radicalization of a clich? borrowed from reality. As human beings, we become the subjects of these clich?s when we come in contact with them; Cytter seems to imply that these clich?s begin to take over even our understanding of everyday life and the reality around us.


1. For an elaborate discussion on the affinity between gender and performativity, see: Judith Butler, "Critically Queer" in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993).