“In a dark time the eye begins to see…” The words are poet Theodore Roethke’s but could almost serve as the distilled imperative of the singular cinema of Germany’s Fred Kelemen. A genuine auteur of the moving image, Kelemen garnered much attention for his visionary nineties trilogy – Fate, Frost and Nightfall – in which the profound social uncertainties of an emergent, radically altered Europe and the stark personal crises of its dispossessed were explored with a rigorous formal invention and compelling emotional intensity. Indeed, the late Susan Sontag found in Kelemen’s work an urgent relevance, a kindred spirit to the meditative, metaphysical cinema of Sokurov, Béla Tarr and Sharunas Bartas, where profound enquiries into both being and the nature of the image are primary concerns. In this latest feature, Fallen, Kelemen continues on his defiantly independent path – with his absolute commitment to making on one’s own terms, Cassavettes is surely an influence – to craft a brooding, existential fable for an unstable new century, a telling monochrome noir of yearning, unanchored lives lived on the edge of often troubling revelation. Set in Riga, it follows the attempts of an isolated archivist, Matiss Zelcs, to trace the identity of a woman he passed on a night bridge but did not speak to, a woman he then heard leap into the river and unseeing. Overcome by his passivity in that turning moment, he becomes consumed by a need to assemble a sense of what had led to such an action. Acquiring her handbag, he begins to construct a narrative around letters and photographs (in striking homage to Antonioni’s Blow Up), and steadily infiltrates himself as an active agent into the life of the man she left behind. Obsession filling the vacancy at the core of his own days, Zelcs’ search for meaning grows increasingly tormented. From its virtuoso opening sequence, an extended tracking shot of remarkable atmospheric power, Kelemen constructs a world in which identity, worth, belonging and belief are both terribly vulnerable and so much sought, albeit with a quiet desperation. Working at the spiritual heart of the European art cinema tradition, where the self and place, as well as the medium of film itself, are constantly interrogated and re-imagined, he is nevertheless a true poet of the edges, of thresholds, of the hybrid, whether in location, intention or production. Shooting on digital video (transferred vividly to film) in the challenged Baltic port and with a protagonist whose surface reticence belies great internal turmoil, he shapes a vision, at once luminous and deeply shadowed, of moral ambiguity and profound social shifts. Swimming against the tide of almost all contemporary cinema in his passionate creation of a timely, resonant, aesthetically bold and philosophically enlivened oeuvre, Kelemen’s is a pressing, essential voice, needed more than ever in these all too fallen times. Gareth Evans ,“Vertigo” Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 3 Autumn 2006 .........................................................................................................................................
|