Keren Cytter, Der Spiegel, 2007
Digital video, colour, sound. 4 min 30 sec (looped)
Courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall…’ It’s a familiar trope. Like the Magic Mirror that the Queen in Snow White stares into, Keren Cytter’s Der Spiegel (The Mirror) centres a forty-something woman who is seeking youth and beauty in her mirror image. She is slowly coming to terms with her reflection no longer presenting a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old, whilst hankering after some unavailable love interest. 'I must prepare, stretch my skin like a lampshade,' she tells her mirrored self, upon seeing this man walk into the courtyard through the window. Complicating this love triangle is another man, claiming to be her husband, who everyone else is trying to bat away. Caught in the midst of this drama as the director and camerawoman, Keren Cytter has scripted and staged a play about sex, lust, love and language. All this intrigue happens in one continuous take, shot in what was at the time Cytter’s Berlin apartment.
The protagonist is helped along by three other female characters who act as narrators, at times directly addressing the audience, playing guitar or reading out stage cues. In this role they form the ‘chorus’, a group of actors which in classical Greek drama describes and comments upon the main action through speech or song. Unusually, the chorus at times steps back into the scene as characters. This duality is a recurring motif, also seen in the use of the mirror and the different languages spoken throughout.
The chorus is not the only reference to the history of theatre. The actors’ lines feature insults ('die, you horse!' and 'you are a doughnut' stand out) that would not be out of place in a Shakespearean drama. However, it was actually the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, known for his politically charged ‘epic theatre,’ who Cytter took inspiration from whilst developing the script. Her translations of some of his work featured quite heavily in early versions of the text.
The process of translation, which is so present throughout the work —with the speech flipping between German, English and the persistent, though unrealised ‘threat’ of also going into French — was actually happening between the people involved in staging the work. As English is first introduced, the chorus acknowledges this shift, and the presence of the camera, with the reprimand that 'subtitles are a nightmare, let the people rest', directed down the lens. Cytter, who was learning German at the time, chose to write some of the lines in German to benefit from the fact all the actors were native speakers. It is this coming to grips with a new language that is the real reason behind some of the more endearingly infantile or surprising lines, such as the horse insult.
Part play, part home video and part relationship sitcom, Der Spiegel deals with existential themes of our humanity. In doing so, the work evokes the spirit of French Nouvelle Vague film making. Like the New Wave filmmakers of the 1950s Cytter experiments with the edit and drags out the existential questions by presenting the narrative as one continuous loop, creating confusion as to where the story might stop and start. Stuck in this loop, perhaps the leading lady can forever stay the same age after all. Now they just need to agree if she is forty-two, forty-three or forty-four.