Keren Cytter: The new ‘kit(s)chen sink’

Four Seasons, Tramway, Glasgow

Right at home in today’s culture of mash-up, Keren Cytter takes elements of seductive, Hitchcockian noir, hammy melodrama, home videos, and social realist ‘kitchen sink’ forms, and melds them together in non-linear, many-layered narratives that showcase their own fakery.

Four Seasons (2009) tells the tragic tale of Lucy/Stella, a wayward Hollywood beauty in a leopard-print dress who climbs the stairs to her neighbour’s flat to request that he turns his music down.  Through the scrambled re-wind of events that follows, she is led to discover that she’s not Lucy, but Stella, and is, in fact, dead.

Far less elaborate than Hitchcock’s famous title sequences, the red ‘Four Seasons’ title is nevertheless just as evocative of the film to come: straight out of an old Christmas edition of The Radio Times, it promises a fake Christmas tree with lacklustre baubles, green plastic doilies, and a ‘70s-esque cream gateau birthday cake; tawdry treats and a celebration of kitsch that the film doesn’t fail to deliver.

In its use of ‘80s kitsch particularly, the film points to culture’s gross, routine fetishism of cultural iconography from the recent past, whilst itself being complicit in this act.  Classic cinematic clichés such as the smoky, winding staircase, and the thick, sticky Ribena blood running down white bathroom tiles are not about encouraging the viewer to suspend her disbelief, nor are they a revelatory exposé of the artifice of the screen – this, of course, is old news.  Instead, they express a greedy lust – if not love – for the material stuff of drama, raiding the mise-en-scène archive and recycling its most overt motifs.

Although Four Seasons is very much a product of today’s cultural climate, an effect of these multiple, clashing styles is that it seems, oddly, to exist at no clear point in time.  The absence of historical continuity, in addition to the typically avant-garde discontinuous narrative, prevents it from being easily “read” in a linear fashion.  In Cytter’s wonderland of stylistic impurity, conventional tools of interpretation are defunct, and only the artificiality is constant.

Rather than parodying these forms and subjects, however, Cytter portrays them with warmth.  A reviewer of the New Museum’s 2009 survey show The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, in which Cytter exhibited, observed in the New York Times that characteristic to the artists included was a preference for sentiment over irony.  This is certainly applicable to Four Seasons, in which the voice of the female lead is the source of whatever sentiment we feel towards the characters.  Speaking brightly in a slightly-too-loud, earnest, almost childlike voice, Lucy/Stella directs her chatter to the male character, but at times seems to be speaking to herself; an unofficial narrator of the events as she sees them.

With a murder of passion, a domestic setting, and almost certainly a bit of IKEA furniture, the drama can be likened to a TV soap opera.  But its integrity is in doubt, the viewer’s alliance with the characters changeable, and verisimilitude a moot point.  In the current age of mash-ups, re-interpretations, re-makes, re-hashings, homage, pastiche, and still other forms that adapt existing material, any new product is essentially read in terms of its relations to the canon.  Keren Cytter’s films, then, can be seen as bringing the kitsch to ‘kit(s)chen sink.’

Four Seasons runs from 16 April – 20 June 2010 at Tramway, Glasgow.

Love and Irony in Twenty-first Century Culture

With the onset of the new century, digitalisation spread rapidly and “the user” began to be courted just as “the consumer” had been before it.  Every public and private body in the West hastened to form an online version of itself as communication between the individual and the wider world was construed as vital to both professional success and basic social functioning.

Society became like market research on a mass scale.  Opinions were wanted and audience interaction was plugged at every turn by the media and public bodies, creating a huge, overflowing vat of homogenous talk.  By the late ‘90s, the term “user-friendly” had outgrown its buzzword status, but having permeated society to its core, the concept endured as fundamental to our ideology.

In the last few years, places and spaces devoted to Comment have become ubiquitous, whilst distinctions between professional and amateur commentators have become blurred and in some ways irrelevant.  Comment was invested in as the shiny new commodity – perhaps seen as a perfect, renewable resource because it’s free.

Culture, that useful, catch-all deposit for a plethora of odds and ends, has proved the ideal climate for the growth of Comment, as it supports the increasing tendency towards self-referencing and self-reflexivity that has resulted from the general acceleration of media and information-exchange. The national media has capitalised upon the rapid succession of social networking sites, boosting its prominence in cultural life and, with the near-mania for audience engagement, bringing us closer to it.

Irony

Something about the combination of this new prominence of the media and our culture’s appetite for myth-making proved to be toxic, and everything began to seem unpleasantly “seeped” – as they would say – in rhetoric.  With hyperbole a key element of this, we are perpetually in a state of crisis: off-hand, I recall hearing that criticism, culture, schools, politics and British sport are all in a state of crisis, and this was just yesterday.  Initially, I was devastated, but who knows?  It might be different tomorrow.

Review: Glasgow Short Film Festival: Artists’ Film and Video Programme

The programme comprised ten short films ranging from a relatively conventional documentary on a couple of eccentric fluorescent art enthusiasts in Amsterdam to pseudo-documentaries including “a post punk piece of pagan sensibility, complete with bestiality, buggery and boundless energy,” as Andrew Kötting described his 1984 film Klipperty Klöpp.

In the Q and A session that followed the films, it was hard to get a discussion going as the programme’s curator, Gregor Johnstone, seemed wont to put a judgement spin on the questions directed to the filmmakers who were present.  When asked about the extent to which other artists’ films influenced her work, Lila de Magalhaes said that of course she did watch them but didn’t restrict her source material to art and was more influenced by things from everyday life.

Johnstone expanded on this, saying that sometimes it’s better to talk about art films out with the context of stuffy theory, which he had often found killed his own work (“Barthes made my arse weep”).  Similarly, presenting these films in the context of Glasgow Short Film Festival, which potentially attracts an audience less familar with art films, had informed his selection process, as he aimed to avoid sending them to sleep with anything that was too long.

A valid point, perhaps, but in the silence that immediately followed, this seemed to pre-empt the possibility of any worthwhile discussion in favour of a good old chat about how filmmakers made films that turned out as they did because that was how the filmmakers intended them to turn out, and that was that.