Keren Cytter
Les Ruissellements du Diable, 2008

10 min, digital video, color/sound.

The film Les Ruissellements du Diable (literally "The whisper of the devil", 2008), is based on the short film of the Argentine filmmaker Julio Cortázar Las babes des Diablo (1958); another reference is the film Blowup by Michelangelo Antonioni shot in 1967 (again is based on Cortázar). The dialogues of the two main characters, a man and a woman, are not synchronized or don’t exist, while in-between the credits appear, confusing the viewer about the end of the film. The temporal discrepancy apparently obliterates all actual and fictional: the female protagonist is simultaneously an actor and TV presenter who stages her alter ego as an erotic fantasy. Alternating, the man and the woman tell the story, with the man speaking in the third-person singular and the woman in the first-person. Again and again a meeting in the park and an enlarged photo of this meeting take centre stage. The superimposed narrator characterizes the two translators as amateur photographers - thus people who work with language and image and who have the facility to change them in subtle ways. The metaphor of translation, whose specific set of problems is an important part of the film, is driven further in so far as the French dialogue is subtitled in English. Amidst all of these sounds and images appears a frontal close-up of a man masturbating. One might, like Skye Sherwin does in ArtReview, conclude that in “Les Ruissellement, reality is unstable, art the only certainty, solipsism unavoidable, and consequently masturbation the only thing that seems truly, graphically and physically" ‘real’.".