12/7/2010

AMAZING!
Just discovered this video tonight. It has inspired me immensely, as I'm beginning to do more video work.
Keren Cytter - Four Seasons, 2009
**Warning-Nudity**







As the film unravels, conflicting narratives are revealed, switching between the stories of Stella, a tragic tale of heart-break and domestic murder, echoing Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Lucy. A voice-over describes the building using its architectural elements as metaphors for human behaviour. Climaxing with a series of spontaneously combusting objects – birthday cake, Christmas tree, record player – Four Seasons is a homage to all that is fake, showcasing visual clichés, lo-fi special effects and deadpan delivery. Yet, somehow, Cytter creates a sense of poignancy rather than of cynicism.


Cytter’s work emphasizes only multiple fragmented moments of feeling. As the man in Four Seasons explains to Stella, ‘I loved you then and I love you.’ Stella replies ‘… you pushed me. Head hit the floor so hard and my skull cracked wide open […] You broke my back. My knees. My heart.’ Clearly he wasn’t in love with Stella at that point. Cytter flouts her style clashes – home-movie Hitchcock, lo-fi Hollywood glamour, soap-opera Samuel Beckett, soft-core feminism – manipulating these cultural tools with results that range from the banal to the sublime, from the embarrassingly comic to the vulgarly surreal.
Kathy Noble