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Carving Light from Shadows: The Extreme Vision of Fred Kelemen | Michael Pattison | June 2017 –– Matiss Zelcs, Fallen In the depths of unfathomable despair, we find hope. Fred Kelemen’s is a cinema of resilience. More than this, it is a cinema in which resilience is a banal act, an everyday process by which we don’t so much conquer or solve the dark mysteries of the world as merely negotiate them. These are not films about the triumph of a will: when the end credits begin, we remain troubled, disturbed. And so we should — this is Europe: debt-ridden, paranoid, post-conflict. A sewer of transit. Kelemen, born in West Berlin in 1964, has accumulated a body of work that on the one hand is rooted to a peculiar strand of existentialism, one which today seems increasingly anachronistic in cinematic terms: like Europe itself — suffering a prolonged death agony — existentialism seems too outmoded, too old-fashioned, too self-indulgent to be carry much philosophical weight. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that Fallen, when it premiered in 2005, prompted critics to recall the likes of Antonioni, whose own minimalist depictions of existentialism — of men searching for meaning in a dangerously meaningless world — were both ahead and very much of their time. On the other hand — at some point, should you dive deep enough — a full commitment to one’s thematic concerns becomes a point of lasting fascination: the entire thesis, in fact. Kelemen’s project, from his debut feature Fate (1994) to last year’s Sarajevo Songs of Woe, has demonstrated nothing if not sincerity in its total, even confrontational investment in social outsiders and their hideous plight. These films can be read as extreme snapshots of a society long past its brink: not so much late capitalism as early barbarism. In this sense, like the classics of existentialism, Kelemen’s oeuvre eschews realism in favour of a symbolic hysteria. The extreme vision of such allegories is a strategic and profitable structural choice: from the darkly etched shadows, the director carves faint shimmers of light — which don’t so much reflect our humanity as refract it. Things (people, scenarios, places) are recognisable and even perhaps relatable here, but they are distorted, discomfiting, ugly. Action is sparse and conventional dialogue has broken down, but communicative mechanisms have shifted: they survive in mutated form. Mundane interiors, such as the state archives in Fallen — or even the unpeopled riverbanks at the end of that film — are made otherworldly by a drone-like musicality: distant hums, barking dogs, the rattle of rain on a metal roof. Fate opens with the sound of a menacing accordion, which accompanies a montage of faces, each of which displays some evidence of social neglect. The accordion, we learn, belongs to Russian busker Valery (Valerij Fedorenko), an immigrant who suffers abuse, humiliation, and exploitation at the hands of others. His lover is Ljuba (Sanja Spengler), from whom he is separated. Each goes their separate path; over the course of a single night, society’s toils bring them back together. Asking what remains of one’s humanity past the point of despair, the film paints the very bottom of the social ladder with a strangely stirring romanticism. As its cast of characters drink themselves into a kind of revelatory ruin, Fate's unique, fuzzy texture — a result of it being shot on Hi-8 before being transferred to 16mm — befits its lo-fi dreariness. Permeated thoroughly in a seedy stupor, there’s a heartbreak contained in each of its twelve long scenes — one that seems to go beyond the grim and gritty clichés of low-end melodrama. Indeed, Kelemen’s debut marries an emotional transgressiveness to an undercurrent of unpleasant nastiness. We watch its helplessness helplessly, as Valery is paid like a dancing bear to down a bottle of vodka and Ljuba runs desperately along a street in nothing but a flailing gown, her fragile humanity on open display. Three years later, Kelemen made Frost, which — aptly enough for the second film of what later became an unofficial trilogy — is set in that bleakly liminal space between the end of one calendar year and the start of another. A slow-burn, 201-minute trudge, this blackest of all Christmas films is a road movie stripped down to essentials: a descent into an increasingly abstract, frozen-over hell. It’s also very beautiful in its way. The opening shot — like something in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) — depicts the seemingly miraculous: a young boy floating, asleep, along an empty Berlin backstreet. As the frame gradually widens, however, the shot reveals that the young lad — seven-year-old Micha (Paul Blumberg) — is propped up on his drunken father’s shoulders, the latter (Mario Gericke) struggling somnambulantly back home. The second shot of the film, like some trippy imitation of Hitchcock’s trademark shots in Vertigo (1958), is an aerial view that defies any human perspective, slowly twisting as the camera descends centrally down an apartment block’s stairwell. When we return to this under-lit location, not long after, with an all-too-human point-of-view, Kelemen fully integrates the architecture into his mise-en-scène. Micha stands to catch water leaking ceaselessly from a drain, its visual and sonic serenity providing an outlet for his emotional state: off-screen, we hear what he is evidently trying to drown out — the sound of his father raping his mother Marianne (Anna Schmidt). In this world, the humans are accustomed to brutality: their buildings cry for them. Marianne’s rape and subsequent beating is one too far: she wakes Micha and sets off with him into the night, packed with minimal luggage and maximum resistance. A nightmare of neglect and abandonment, Frost unfolds as a succession of terrifying episodes that are nevertheless absorbing and compelling in their atmospheric intensity and patient crawl. Peril is never far away: A funfair (carnivalesque horror); a glacial walk over a field of ice; elsewhere, a black BMW pulls up alongside Marianne and Micha on a provincial road, its driver unseen as it passive-aggressively rolls forward in suggestive, sexual, stop-start stutters. A story of escape, Frost inverts the pattern of Stalker: if that film involved three adult men negotiating their way into an unknown place, this involves two more vulnerable pilgrims — a mother and her child — struggling to get away from one. The shadowy premise here gives the fleeting moments of levity an intense, pulsating delirium. At the funfair, Marianne enjoys the delights of the Chair-O-Planes, the camera following her in dizzying cyclicality. Later in the film, she is left alone in a stranger’s mansion — that of the BMW driver (Isolde Barth), who turns out to be even more menacing than expected — as we witness an extended dance to Euro trance, which plays out like some epileptic seizure. Both instances of euphoria are followed by sobering fear: at the funfair, Marianne alights the swings to find Micha has gone missing, whereas in the later scene she finishes her dance to find the mansion’s owner nakedly bathing Micha in a sexually provocative manner. As both scenes intervene upon the singularly grim proceedings, a sense of latent trauma emerges. Played excellently by Schmidt, Marianne seems to be acting out the tension between maternal responsibilities and carefree joy, as she vies for the same attentions and promise of protection that she must provide her son. Similarly, the film develops into a complex coming-of-age story for Micha, who sleeps through most of the opening third before evolving, as his journey progresses, into a premature adolescent. Clearly wrestling with nascent Oedipal tensions, he calls home to father: it remains unclear whether this is for help or if the desire is something more murderous. With its church bells, howling winds and unforgiving landscapes, Frost feels like it could be an offshoot of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994): no surprise to learn that Kelemen’s first collaboration with Tarr was as the cinematographer on Journey on the Plain, a documentary looking back at the shooting locations for that film. Like Tarr’s seven-hour epic, Fate sustains an aesthetic beauty that runs as a kind of counterpoint to the sunken depravity of its subject matter, enfolding and strengthening it as its odyssey heads towards a Joycean bar scene encountered at the end of civilisation. As the New Year celebrations kick in, the bangs and screeches of overhead fireworks sound like some long-overdue cue for the apocalypse. We descend. In Nightfall (1999), another Christmas-time romantic horror, Anton (Wolfgang Michael) and Leni (Verena Jasch) break up one night and, like Valery and Ljuba in Fate, go their separate ways. In this darkest of cities — a trans-European hotchpotch of utterly inconsolable desolation — it isn’t long before they realise that they need each other more than ever. Kelemen shot Nightfall on 35mm, though he interrupts his sustained sequence shots with lo-res cutaways, as if to emphasise life’s violent shifts between the dependably beautiful and the incomprehensibly grim. While Leni plunges herself into encounters in which she is sexually mistreated, Anton befriends a stranger whose daughter has been missing for days. In a scene that takes the bells-as-apocalypse motif to new levels of absurdity, the man pleads with Anton to hoist him up into a bell and ring it; unfolding with dreadful inevitability, the scene concludes with Anton ceding to the stranger’s wish, as the latter’s blood splatters down upon him to the deafening sound of ringing. If Fate and Frost unfurled to the rumblings of an implicit dread — barely kept at bay through alcoholism, mental toughness or both — Nightfall foregrounds sexual violence and makes victims of the innocent. There’s a palpable unease to scenes like that in which a young girl is beckoned into a nightclub’s backroom and placed onto a billiards table, as Kelemen pans right to reveal a cameraman and a line of suited men ogling the child. None of this is going to end well. Indeed, the film establishes its sleaze to the point at which we might reasonably expect the worst when Anton happens across a wounded swan atop a spoil tip: will he kill it, or fuck it? Binding each of these films is love, that emotion which allows us to sustain hope when all else has gone to pot. From the nocturnal epiphanies of lovers reuniting in Fate and Nightfall to the belated sense of loss and responsibility following a suicide in Fallen, Kelemen provides his protagonists a way out from the cycles of self-destruction. In fact, getting out is the easy part: it’s surviving beyond that which proves so troublesome. .............................................................................................................................................................. Michael Pattison is a film critic from Gateshead, UK. His publications include Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute and MUBI. In September 2016, he began a practice-based PhD, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which responds to the urban environment and seeks to synthesise a structural film practice to the psychogeographic dérive. .............................................................................................................................................................. |