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Three Films by Fred Kelemen | Anthology Film Archives, January
2003
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The young German director Fred Kelemen has been making
potent, aching meditations on human dissolution since first drawing international
attention with his 1994 FATE/VERHAENGNIS. A colleague and collaborator
of the Hungarian Béla Tarr (for whom he shot a 1995 video short,
JOURNEY TO THE PLAIN), Kelemen displays a similar sense of beautiful despair,
mixing his miserablist compositions with a dose of grace. Remarkably unsparing,
(“Hope isn’t something I deal with,” Kelemen has said),
the three features in this small retrospective nevertheless represent
a bold new direction in European humanist filmmaking.
FATE/VERHAENGNIS
Shot on Hi-8 video and transferred to film by the most rudimentary of
technical means, FATE wholly realizes Kelemen’s bleak vision of
a late-capitalist Europe. The film takes the form of a “long, dark
night of the soul” for its two principal characters, a Russian accordion
player and his erstwhile girlfriend, as they encounter enough middle-European
degradation to fill a hundred Nick Cave albums.
“Like the other films being made now that one
can really care about – and they are all too few – Fred Kelemen’s
FATE is a visionary, one-of-a-kind achievement. I admire this film very
much” – Susan Sontag
FROST
An epic expansion on Kelemen’s localized themes of human cruelty
and loneliness, FROST remains his most fully realized film, wisely focusing
on the universal relationship between a mother and son as they flee her
abusive husband. A film full of terrifying emptiness and sudden, violent
catharsis, FROST is one of the landmark European films of the late 90’s.
NIGHTFALL/ABENDLAND
Expanding his location-shooting from Germany to Portugal, Kelemen also
integrated the mournful fatalism of that country’s “Fado”
tradition of ballads of love and death. Using a strikingly original combination
of celluloid long takes and close-up video inserts, the film chronicles
a single night in the separate lives of an estranged couple, each of them
confronting the abjection around them with the muted horror of a wounded
sleepwalker.
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