True Romance

Keren Cytter’s works play the role of being films but deliberately miss the mark: the camerawork is shaky, the acting is poor, the plots are generic and the dialogue cliché-ridden. Characters face the camera and admit they think they’re being watched; images recur out of sequence and plots of television shows overtake the main action. Voices are discordantly overdubbed – women provide the lines for men; two voices speak for one character, breaking up fluid delivery into the sound of robot voicemail: ‘You.’ ‘Have.’ ‘Three.’ ‘Messages.’ Films that should be standard love triangles, Western gunfights or neo-noir murder–suicides descend into joyous cacophonies of filmic clichés done just wrong.

Cytter, an Israeli-born, Berlin-based filmmaker, creates short narratives that play on the way art and life converge, and on the way that this is no new revelation. Her world is one in which self-reflexivity (‘This is just like a movie!’) is as banal as a man riding a horse into the distance. If every pop song about the song that’s being sung, or teen horror flick about teen horror flicks, drives a nail into the coffin of self-reflexivity, then in a decidedly contrary and populist way Cytter is attempting to prise these nails out. There is a measure of defiance in the way her characters inhabit art-house stereotypes, from the early French Film (2002), a pastiche of Nouvelle Vague cinema, to the irritating self-consciousness of Something Happened (2007): ‘I’ve forgotten my lines!’, ‘These words are delaying my death’. 21/5/04 (part of ‘The Dates Series’, 2004) examines the idea of the hero through a mishmash of stereotypes, all configured in different ways: the self- reflexive hero on the park bench who narrates the action around him (‘woman on the left, point straight’), the brooding anti-hero of J.D. Salinger inspiration, the swaggering hero of Western flicks approaching his enemy in slow motion. If the use of popular material is often critical in contemporary art, Cytter’s embrace is celebratory, and perhaps this is one reason she chooses to give her video works the generic term ‘films’, rather than adopting medium-specific terminology.

In a 2006 interview with the writer Avi Pitchon, who has appeared in her films, Cytter explained: ‘A cliché for me is an absolute truth, it is like the practical bible, it is something that passed through many people and it is this one sentence that stuck with them all. At least one of these people must genuinely believe in it. If the majority holds on to it, obviously it affects them. I keep saying I’m one of those people but nobody believes me.’1 Such defensiveness (‘I keep saying …’) appears also throughout her work, where both dialogue and editing proceed on the principle of ironic qualification. Conversation in her films is a contrapuntal exchange between anything and its opposite: the wished-for and the real, the everyday and the profound, the on-screen and the off-screen, even the French and German languages. DREAMTALK (2005) portrays a love triangle/rectangle in which the good-looking and boring Dan is in love with the fictional television heroine Sandra; his best friend, Mark, the ‘loser’, loves Dan’s girlfriend, Jen; Jen loves Dan but should love Mark. The dialogue runs as follows:

Dan: ‘The knife is not sharp ... Cut the meat. And vegetables. Leave the blood and the leaves …’

Jen [off-screen]: ‘I love him.’

Dan: ‘… on the table.’

Jen [off-screen]: ‘I love him.’

Dan: ‘Sandra!’

Jen [off-screen]: ‘I love him.’

Dan: ‘Sandra!’

Jen [off-screen]: ‘I love him.’

Dan: ‘Sandra!’

Jen [off-screen]: ‘I’ll call him.’

What’s touching about this stagy and staccato exchange is not the poignancy of Jen’s misplaced love but the banality of what she chooses to do – to ring him to say she’s at the railway station and is coming over to watch television. Cytter’s films display a real interest in love as an actual thing people do, and, despite their structural exploitation of clichés, endlessly examine the many types of relationships that exist. In her early ‘Friends’ series (2001) she depicts, in Raz and Nathalie, the attenuated but respectful relationship between two young women and, in Tal and Naamah, the familiar phenomenon of a close, happy friendship that will never go beyond platonic affection. In alternating bouts of musical abandon and tense conversation Tal and Naamah attempt to describe this bright stasis: ‘We’re like a random meeting in a street that does not end … like a married couple that falls in love every moment … like a monk that stopped talking yesterday!’ Their joy seems both forced and spontaneous, and Cytter’s amateur aesthetic makes it impossible to determine whether that’s deliberate or simply because they’re bad actors: Tal and Naamah (their real names) instead appear as real people acting before a real camera.

Central to Cytter’s work is her characters’ awareness that they are performing in a film; this gives them a measure of agency while also leaving open the possibility that people follow cinematic scripts in everyday life. The man who goes down on one knee, the woman who tears the letter – how much of this behaviour has been prompted? In this respect Cytter is bringing her video camera to one of literature’s greatest comedic tropes: the hero or heroine who thinks he or she is in a novel. (Cytter’s films are indeed more literary than visually experimental, and she has recently published a short novel, The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats, 2007.) Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), for instance, is a portrait of a young bourgeois wife who lusts after the life portrayed in romance novels and seeks, disastrously, to turn her petty love affairs into similar amours fous. The novel’s famous livestock auction scene – in which Emma Bovary’s clichéd declarations of love are interspersed with the earthy announcements of the fair auctioneer ­­– closely anticipates not only film’s parallel editing but also the particular dramatic technique used by Cytter. And, of course, in spite of his wholesale skewering of his heroine, Flaubert purportedly gave this vapid, deluded creature the fullest measure of support at his novel’s obscenity trial: the immortal ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ Cytter shares this current of defiance and loyalty to the everyday over the pretentious; she claims as her heroes people who take clichés seriously while being sceptical of everything else.

In Cytter’s recent, more elaborate fictions the cinematic apparatus is moving further into the foreground. In Something Happened, an altercation between a man and a gun-toting dame, the characters battle as much with each other as with the narrative within which they are set. DREAMTALK’s distinction between the scripted love plot on television and the film’s love triangle ultimately collapses formally when the camera ‘leaves’ and the characters sit like lost ducks in the dark. ‘Oh God. Oh God. Someone took the camera is gone! Someone took the camera is gone!’ ‘I cannot see beyond the box. Someone took the camera!’ When the characters ‘find’ the camera, DREAMTALK opens onto the first scene of Atmosphere (2005), a film of two flatmates living, like almost all of the characters in Cytter’s films, in the aspirational world of urban kitchens, rolled cigarettes and frank sexuality. Cytter creates a world that pretends towards universality – setting films in the kind of kitchens that many people inhabit, delivering lines in different idioms and different accents, relying on plots that are as common as bedtime stories ­­– but they end, with sheer glee, in the hysterical, almost orgiastic repetition of ready-made phrases and gestures. It’s the world of clichés run amok.