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Kelemen has Fallen into damnation | Tammy Stone, Toronto, September
14, 2005 Fred Kelemen’s elegiac triptych – Fate (1994), Frost
(1997) and Nightfall (1999) – has elicited the moniker of miserablism
and been associated, along with the works of Sharunas Bartas and Béla
Tarr, with what film critic Tony McKibbin calls “the cinema of damnation.”
Kelemen’s latest feature, Fallen (Krišana), is a haunting and minimalist
exercise in this same tradition of filmmaking, one that commingles despair,
alienation and sorrowful transcendence. Abstracted by perfectly gloomy
black-and-white cinematography and a restrained, at times claustrophobic
mise-en-scčne, Fallen (Krišana) is set in Riga, Latvia but envelopes the
viewer in a universe of yearning and solitude. Matiss Zelcs works at the
national archive; after witnessing what he thinks is a woman drowning
one night, he meticulously sets out to discover her identity and fate.
His loneliness and desperate need for human connection is reflected in
scenes of extraordinary, momentous duration. “In this film I wanted to
be stiller,” says Kelemen. “I did without the expressive excesses. They
raged inside instead. I put the drama into the heads, into the imagination
… the real drama takes place in our spirit.” Watching Fallen (Krišana)
one has the uncomfortable feeling of being privy to the portrait of a
man drawn in painstaking detail who nevertheless remains entirely obscure.
The boundaries of realism and intense expressionism become blurred and
the possibility of knowing Matiss or understanding his motivations is
unconditionally absent. “It was always very important for me to create
distance between the audience and the characters of my films. I don’t
want the audience to identify with the characters. The audience should
observe and understand the characters and follow their way with disgust
or compassion or whatever feelings are provoked.” Matiss’s search for
the girl is torturous, his life seemingly defined by pain and emptiness.
Is he comfortable reaching out for her because he knows he can never know
her, or is there a redemptive quality to his search? To Kelemen, whose
vision is not wholly devoid of hope, the acknowledgement of ambiguity
and suffering is imperative. “Things are not as we want them to be. And
we do not have the courage to look straight into the face of reality and
to change them. We prefer to dream the world imprisoned in our own illusions.
But there are moments when we have to wake up, when something shocks us
and our dream-world gets a crack through which we can see reality. These
moments make us sad. But these are moments of truth.” |