Untitled

- Film & Video (Film & Video)
16 min

“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life. In the film, we witness the drama of a blended family, heightened by adultery and finally murder. For the film’s decor, Cytter, instead of filming a domestic interior, uses a theater stage, a place of representation by excellence. Dialogues, accessories and camera movements disrupt the boundary between the stage and the “behind the scenes” acts which are in fact staged. While its difficult to distinguish the stage’s front and back, also it is difficult to determine the improvised and real. Like her other films, reality is constructed and artificial, but the theatrical element complicates our relationship to her characters. Are the actors in a scene or subjects of their own life? In “Untitled,” the artist merges theatricality on stage and in life finally offering a permanent performance.

Keren Cytter makes films who appropriate and transform different registers, from film noir, melodrama, documentary and television series. Although visually close to amateur filmmaking, the film’s dialogues adopt complex structures of multiple degrees as well as non-linear narratives. Keren Cytter is interested in human behavior and modes of communication. Often shot in modest interiors, her films depict dysfunctional families and friendships on the verge of breakdown. In the words of her former teacher, Marlene Dumas, when commenting on Cytter’s dark humor,”it is not a funny hahaha humor, nor a sour humor. It is humor as an insult. It comes from a cruelty, a keen intelligence mixed with extreme emotional vulnerability and an acute awareness of one’s own stupidity and inability to understand one another. “ Keren Cytter was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv. She lives and works in Berlin.

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