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Interview Ksenia Shcherbino / Kultura TV Channel : How would you define for yourself the difference between independent, or artistic film-making, and mass/ Hollywood production? Fred Kelemen : If I have to talk about the difference between independent, or artistic film-making, and mass/ Hollywood production I only can talk about an ideal knowing that only very few so called independent or artistic filmmakers are really living concerning this ideal. The most important difference should be that the so called independent or artistic filmmaker first of all is committed to his vision, to his artistic needs and ways of expression. He has to follow his inner voice and to be faithful to his artistic inspiration and knowledge and taste. He has to serve his ideas, his artistic and ethic (not moralistic) persuasions and not a somehow defined market or some promised financial success. He should be a real, nonconformist artist who expresses with his tools what has to be expressed without being corrupted or manipulated by any political or material force or seduction or any fear of not being successful or accepted. All these mentioned points seem to be quite opposite to the way of making films for an industry which understands film as a product to be sold as expensive as possible.
K. S. : Do you think the crisis will have an effect on the process of film-making? F. K. : No, it will not have an effect on the process of filmmaking but maybe on the kind of films being financed and finally realized.
K. S. : Your films are very European, as they have a particular air, nothing close to that of the US or of the East. Do you feel it the same way? F. K. : Well, I am very European and Europe is the place I am living in. Even though I feel some closeness to some Non-European cultures.
K. S. : You once described Europe as a space of the diversity of cultures – of the different languages and peoples, of the absence of homogeneity. Do you think the apparition of the European Union has changed this experience? Has it influenced you personally? F. K. : The apparition of the European Union did not have influenced me personally. But the apparition of the European Union started to influence the life of many people in the Eastern European countries by exporting its capitalist system to them in an even more brutal and total way than it existed before in the Western countries. The cultural diversity of Europe, which is for sure the richness of the European culture as a whole and an important element of the identities of the single European regions, hopefully may not disappear but it is for sure in danger if the idea of a European Union of free trade and the freedom of movement becomes an ideology of uniformity and of the adaptation of the same cultural values where the differences are not respected.
K. S. : You worked with Bela Tarr. What was it like? F. K. : It was an artistically satisfying work. K. S. : What do you think about the cultural division between Eastern Europe and Western Europe? Although you were born in West Berlin, there's a certain touch of being from Eastern Europe. Is it what you feel like or are you just imagining it? Is national identity important for you? F. K. : National identity is not important for me and it should not be important at all. It leads to stupid wars and makes the people blind for the real human values. Identity should not be searched for or found in nationality. It is a fake and it is used to manipulate people. A nation is too abstract and a too big thing to feel it. The real feelings of people are much more concrete. They are maybe focused on a region, on a town, on a village, on a district in a city. You can identify with your town or your region. You cannot identify with a nation but maybe with the earth were you were born and grown up, with the culture of a region, with its light, its smell, its traditions as far as you experienced them etc. And you can identify with the people you were or are surrounded by, with the people you love. And for sure you can feel close to the spirit of people you never met when you meet them in their books or music or paintings or films etc. These brothers or sisters of your soul can be very close to you. But for sure, from my childhood on I was connected to some Eastern European cultures through the people in my surrounding. And these experiences were leaving there marks.
K. S. : Susan Sonntag compared you to Bela Tarr and Aleksandr Sokurov. Who influenced you in your film-making perception? F. K. : My biggest influence in my filmmaking was music. Quiet early, in the age of 13, I was fascinated by the music of the Hungarian composer Béla Bártok. His flow of sounds and its sometimes minimal development, its rising and falling influenced my use of time in my films. Later as well the music from India for example or the music of Dimitri Shostakovich or Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina or Valentin Silvestrov had the same effect on me. Before studying film directing and cinematography I studied painting with a teacher who was a student of Oskar Kokoschka. I was in love with paintings, with pictures, with the use of forms and light in old paintings and new paintings but especially the German Expressionism fascinated me and I could identify with its mood; but not only in painting but as well in literature besides the novels of Dostojevskij and Kafka. Later when I started studying film it was again the German expressionist films and the films by Murnau, Lang, Dreyer etc. and the Russian silent movies, especially by Vsevolod Pudovkin which had an influence on my cinematic thinking. And for sure the Italian Neo-Realism which I still love a lot.
K. S. : Do you agree with Sonntag's statement that “you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films”? F. K. : Yes, I agree. And I can see it every time when I am working with students no matter in which country. There is a sad loss and it only could be saved by this generation itself by understanding what a wonderful language and art the art of film is, how unique it is and how rich in its possibilities which are not used at all. If the alphabet of cinema would have 26 letters in many cases just the first three are used. There is a big lack of courage and a big lack of understanding how deep the art of film could lead us, how many layers it has. Normally just the most obvious, the surface is used - which is the simple use of film for telling a story as if it would be literature. But film is not literature. Film is an art on its own with its own approach, its own tools, its own magic. And like a musician who needs a musical sense, a film artist needs a special cinematic sense - and the strong will to serve it and to suffer for it.
K. S. : What is your image of European public? Do they have a gusto for avant garde/ indie movies? F. K. : There is no general European public. But there is a public in Europe which esteems avant-garde / indie movies. For sure this public is a minority but always in the past the avant-garde was an art of a minority for a minority. Without this minorities there would have been and there will be no progress but a status quo, a stagnation, a cultural death. The minorities are essentially important for the life of a culture and an art. The simple orientation on financial success as a criteria for the financing of films destroys these minority artists and audiences and as a consequence it destroys the culture and finally the human being as a spiritual, cultural being.
K. S. : How would you determine the genre of your films, in particular, that of Krisana? F. K. : I don't know. They are films and they talk in a cinematic language.
K. S. : How do you approach making films? F. K. : I do not understand this question. Could you be so kind to make it more concrete?
K. S. : You directed several plays. Do you think there's something in common between theatre and film-making? And what is the difference between it? F. K. : The biggest and most obvious difference is for sure that the theater performance always happens now. The actor's heart beats in the same moments like the audience's hearts. The actor of a film may even be dead already when you watch his performance on the screen. When you are watching a film it is always like looking to the nightly sky. The stars you see may not exist anymore, they may have been faded away already a long time ago. Just their light is still one its way us. A look into the nightly sky and a look onto the screen are always looks into the past. That gives the art of film a special melancholic hue or character. But there are many other differences and many things in common and it depends a lot if we think about it of the perspective of the actor or the director or the audience or if we watch it from a philosophical and metaphysical point of view. It is a very complex topic to talk about.
K. S. : What is more make-believe: theatre or film-making? F. K.: Both is a fake - and an artistic organism with its own realities and truths. And both demand their committed artists to defend them and to touch the audience
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