Our ideas of self and our behavior, are shaped by shared cultural conventions and are learned early on. The performance of the self evolves in impromptu ways and in various contexts. Playing in the park on a bright day, the children in Rinat Kotler’s Super Tiger perform scenes for the camera. Yet what they actually display is an acquired form of aggression and ambivalence learned in a fundamentally violent culture. As many kids and grown-ups do, they were pandering to the camera when a loud off-camera blast was heard, apparently caused by a children’s explosive toy called Super Tiger. In the following six-minute-long scene, the children re-enact and interpret this event. They report from the scene, pretending to be the newscasters they are surely accustomed to hearing on a daily basis. As in Mozard’s work, the camera here remains fixed, focusing on what unfolds before it – in this case, a multi-cultural group of Israeli children reacting to the outcome of a tiny "bomb." The presence of the camera gives them license to simultaneously imagine a fictive scenario and live out a real one.
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