Keren Cytter

Mounted in the Oakville Galleries’ two locations, “Based on a True Story,” Keren Cytter’s largest exhibition in North America, centres on nine films (32 minutes and under) but also includes drawings, books and catalogues. Cytter, an Israeli-born, New York-based artist, first received widespread critical attention in 2009 when her films—typified by fragmented narratives pairing the spontaneity of everyday experience with the artifice of scripted film—screened at the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger than Jesus” and the Venice Biennale.

Viewers of Cytter’s films encounter recurrent non sequitur dialogue, images and subplots peppered with media and cinematic and literary allusions, from avant-garde film and canonical literature to horror movies and reality TV. Text accompanying her 2009 exhibition at London’s Pilar Corrias Gallery states that her films show how “a presentation of images and text which are not related to one another can create a narrative in the viewer’s mind.” Yet, as both the artist and the exhibition’s curator, Helena Reckitt, note, these narratives do not have a point or an overriding theme; instead, they draw viewers into a deadpan comedic and violently emotional psychological labyrinth that toggles between dream and reality.

Aptly illustrating this theme of unreality versus reality is Les Ruissellements du Diable (The Whisper of the Devil), 2008, based on Michelangelo Antonioni’s neo-realist classic, Blow-Up, and the lesser-known short story inspiring the film: Julio Cortázar’s “Las Babas del Diablo.” Interestingly, in Cytter’s film, unlike in Antonioni’s, the witness of the pivotal park encounter is a woman. Cytter completes this gender switch by replacing the voyeurism of the protagonist in Blow-Up, who can photograph young female models suggestively but cannot consummate sexual relationships, with the voyeurism of close-up shots of a man masturbating. Moreover, Cytter’s protagonist is a translator, not a fashion photographer, as in the original story, suggesting the central theme of both story and film: how the distortions of perception and representation can “translate” a witnessed crime from real to unreal. Cytter’s translator further highlights how language causes gaps between communication and truth, a recurrent theme for Cytter, implied in Les Ruissellements du Diable through subtitles reading in the wrong language—French instead of English—and conversations that do not match events.

Likewise, placing the represented against the real is Untitled, a film recalling nouvelle vague cinema, notably Truffaut’s The Last Metro, 1980, a film about a theatre group in occupied France shot as a play staged in front of an audience. Cytter’s disjointed narrative, which dramatizes the true-crime story of a jealous son who murdered his father’s girlfriend, uses both professional and untrained actors who perform on stage before a live audience over which the camera intermittently pans. An intervening director screams at an actor, “Tell him to stop improvising!” Such stressing of the making of her production clearly points out that her take on this tabloid news item is very much a staging even though the unscripted, improvised, reality- show feel it has communicates a real-life drama. Certainly, the film is slow-paced like real time: its edits prolong the narrative’s rising action towards climax. Nevertheless, the anxious fragmentation induced by repeated lines—“He is not my son”—and actions ranging from the subtly nervous—chain smoking—to the blatantly ominous— constant gun toting—create a buildup of tension, leading to a well-anticipated shooting with ridiculously fake blood.

Even more successful in bringing Cytter’s blend of artifice and the quotidian to delightfully campy excess is Four Seasons, 2009, in which the artist similarly explores how desire and violence underlie domestic life. Following the opening shot of a gramophone playing an easy listening rendition of Xavier Cugat’s “Jungle Rhumba” by pop classical pianists Ferrante & Teicher, a woman enters a neighbour’s apartment to make a noise complaint, interrupting a man taking a bath. In another gender switch, here targeting Psycho, the bathing man’s arm bleeds profusely. Then, jump cutting to A Streetcar Named Desire, he mistakes his neighbour for Stella, to whose name she eventually answers. The anecdote quickly becomes even more horror-movie surreal—first with a close-up of blood rivulets flowing along the floor and next with a melee of no-budget special effects: fake snow falling over a bed and a Christmas tree; a birthday cake, a record player and the Christmas tree catching on fire. The film thus ends with a gothic intensity constructed only with melodrama—as if it were an affected, apartment-sized version of the devastating fire destroying Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre.

Certainly, no single theme wrung out of the absurdist Four Seasons will reveal Keren Cytter as a significant artist. And while her narrative experimentations do wittily juxtapose appearance and reality, it is the uncanny, intangible strangeness, a strangeness pervasive in all of her films, that ultimately mesmerizes viewers. ❚

“Keren Cytter: Based on a True Story” exhibited at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens and at Centennial Square from April 14 to June 10, 2012.

Earl Miller is an independent art writer and curator residing in Toronto.