Keren Cytter
Four Seasons, 2009
Four Seasons, 2009
16 min, digital video, color/sound
"The film Four Seasons opens with a neo-noir celebration of late-Hitchcock-meets-1980s-kitsch: a record plays dramatic music by Ferrante & Teicher; thick fake blood drips onto white tiles; snow whirls through the apartment and a lone woman climbs a dark, smoky staircase. Artist Lucy Stein plays the female lead as a wayward Hollywood beauty, clothed in a leopard print dress, teamed with a pink jumper, red lips pouting nonchalantly. ‘Excuse me, my name is Lucy, I’m living next door, second floor. I wanted to complain about the music, its stopped now but …’. Lucy is confronted by a tall naked man, rising out of the bath as bubbles float across his upper thighs. Softcore porn enthusiasts might feel momentarily at home as this scene unfolds, but rather than a fast-track to the act of love, confused, the man starts calling for a woman named Stella.
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 in Frieze Magazine, Issue 123, May 2009
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 in Frieze Magazine, Issue 123, May 2009