» 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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