Manon de Boer
Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Manon de Boer, Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003), Super-8 transferred to video
Dutch artist Manon de Boer creates filmic portraits of actresses, musicians and intellectuals, in which formal simplicity is countered by a dense tangle of inconsistencies. Throughout, her work is buoyed by an underlying concern with the unreliability of narrative.
In this exhibition at Witte de With, couched inside the Liam Gillick retrospective currently occupying the main galleries, de Boer presents intimate portraits of performers, moving beyond the basic contours of factual depiction and capturing instead the subtle seduction that is critical to the art of performance.
This is most evident in de Boer’s Sylvia Kristel (2003), a portrait and collaboration with the eponymous Dutch actress most famous for her role in the soft porn film Emmanuelle. The work stages Kristel as a kind of modern day Scheherazade, languidly recounting tales from her colorful past in a voiceover laced with humour, regret and acid self-awareness.
The film opens with a silent portrait of Kristel, elegantly posed for the camera in a manner that recalls Warhol’s ‘Screen Tests’ (1964-66). It then cuts to an extended montage featuring exterior shots of Paris, accompanied by a meandering voiceover from the actress. As the image crawls across Paris, rising from street to rooftops and back down again, so too Kristel moves through the story of her past. Her narrative lingers over selected events and glosses over others, cutting abruptly from one episode to the next.
Midway through, the camera returns to Kristel, again silent, before the montage begins again, and Kristel begins to tell the story of her life for a second time. There are glaring inconsistencies, as well as varying perspectives and differing points of emphasis. But in both ‘versions’ of her life, Kristel remains a luminous disembodied presence, recounting not only the romantic and sexual seductions that crowded her life, but also the lure of the movies themselves. In this sense, Sylvia Kristel is a cinematic portrait of seduction - the seduction of storytelling, the hypnotic quality of the image, and the power of words and voice as instruments of seduction. Kristel might very well be the ideal subject for de Boer; here, the seduction of form and subject are perfectly fused, and our willingness to trust in the untrustworthy and rely on the unreliable is perfectly primed.
Katie Kitamura
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