.............................................................................................................................................................. There Must Be An Outside Question: The subject matter of Nightfall (Abenland), it left me feeling numb – was it a deliberate choice to shock? Fred Kelemen: The aim is not shocking, but sometimes the truth is shocking. I very much believe the subject of the film is human being, because we are human beings, not animals. We have to communicate with human beings in our time. As long as human beings have problems, I think its worth looking at these problems, and talk about them. For me it is the most interesting thing. Since a human being understands the consciousness of itself, it’s also confronted with the darkness of itself, the secret of itself. And I think every film, every painting, more or less, every portrait, is all an attempt to understand what a human being is. And these questions cause us to reflect upon life in general. And for sure if you want to make a film about real human beings, not cartoons or gimmicks, if you really care about them, you cannot avoid going into the depth of the human being, you cannot avoid the dark parts. Everyone has it. And if you want to understand, you have to go inside, and that’s shocking sometimes. I don’t do things for shock, but I don’t avoid things, and follow the subject as consequentially as possible. There are things I don’t like either, but I think it’s not allowed to avoid these things. I think there is a lot of fear in our societies in general, in filmmaking – I see it when I work with students – they have ideas but not the courage to push the ideas, because they are afraid that nobody wants to see it. So the censorship already starts in the mind of the student. I think when you look back to the 50s or the 30s, there was not such a fear of not having a happy end, or further back to the tragedies of the Greek theatre. The tragedy was a form in itself, and there were authors who wrote only tragedies. It was very important to have these tragedies, because it helps us to understand who we are. Human's life is tragic. I think it’s important not to lose the idea of tragedy. Q.: How much of the film was improvised? F. K.: In the script sometimes I leave empty pages, because I’m not sure what really has to be there but I have a taste of it. If you enter a room and behind the curtain, by the window, someone is standing, you don’t know what he looks like, but you know he’s there because you can see his feet. Sometimes I have this feeling when I write scripts, and I give these scripts to the actors with these empty pages, and I talk a lot with the actors before choosing them, and after the decision we talk, but not very much about the film, rather the topic of the film, the philosophy, the questions with which the film is dealing. So the visual characters, the biography of the actors, influence the script a lot. So after these, its easier to finish the script when I know who is performing. I have the image of the actor, I can better imagine scenes, even reactions, because I know the energy, the way he moves – it’s much easier to develop the scenes. The second script is then completed, and I talk again with the actors. Let's take the swan scene in Nightfall (Abendland)for example. There was an empty page in the script, and the main character has to do something which shows that in a certain situation he cares for somebody, which is an animal. Before he never did anything for anybody but suddenly he cares for a living being which is an animal. While talking about special situations in our lives the main actor of the film Wolfgang Michael told me that many years ago he was coming in drunk from the theatre, and he passed by a river and suddenly there was a noise of a swan, trapped in the bushes, and he couldn’t get away. Without thinking about it, he went down to the river, slipping, and liberated the swan back into the water. And the moment he told me the story I thought this was very good for the film and I integrated it. So it’s based on something real. Everything you see in the film is based on something real that happened to me or somebody, and I just collected it. So even things that seem to be surreal or bizarre have a realistic background. If you take the scene with the bell in the same film, it also has a realistic background, as it was, in the Old Russian Empire, a way of torturing people, The Romans crucified people, and the Russians crashed people in bells. So its not coming from some fantasy, it’s based on something real. It’s not happening now, for sure, but it happened on this earth sometime. Q.: How do you work with sound and how do you see the role of music in films? F. K.: I think the way music is used in most films these days is incredibly unreflective. When a director wants an emotion he puts some music inside. I think there’s too much music in films. I don’t do it. In the film you have just seen Nightfall (Abendland) I don’t use a score. The music you hear comes from realistic sources, from a loudspeaker in a bar. There’s no music just put over a scene. I think that film doesn’t need it. Film is an art of itself, not a mix of all arts. It’s something completely different from the other arts, even if it has elements of the other arts. I think film should be able to communicate and provoke emotions without using music, because music is a different art. I think good film music is more noises and sounds, not melodies, as you can easily kill an image with a melody. Music by itself is completely emotional, it’s a much more abstract art, and you can touch emotions very fast with music, that’s why if you have very strong music, no doubt it will be stronger than the scene. But many films use music in this way because they don’t trust their scenes, don’t trust their actors, and then they push it with the music. So I’m very purist in this case and very much against using music in this way. One should be very careful and not illustrate the scene – it’s better to use a sound than music. Q.: Is there any reason why, at the beginning of Fallen (Krisana), the main character doesn’t save the woman from jumping down the bridge? F. K.: Film, like any art, should be an open space, should give us freedom. So I would never think it wrong if someone understands something differently than myself. I had a discussion at the Berlin Film Festival, a man in the audience said “But why doesn’t he help her, I would have helped her”. And I answered “I’m sure you think that you would have helped her because everyone wants to be a hero and a good person, but even me, I’m not sure if I would have talked to her”. It can be very difficult to decide in this moment, whether to enter somebody else’s life or not. Basically it’s the woman's decision to jump or not. What do you say? The protagonist stops, and maybe he thinks in this moment “Shall I ask her for a coffee or…but now it’s very late for a coffee. Maybe a drink, but what if she doesn’t drink alcohol? Maybe I should ask her to come to my house?” It’s very difficult to say "Don't jump, I don’t think it’s a good idea." You don’t know the reason why someone may decide to finish his or her life. But do you really want to know the reason why somebody wants to jump? Do you want to go deep inside this? There is a moment where the woman turns and looks at the protagonist, and that’s the moment where he loses completely the ambition to help her, and just goes away, maybe because he’s a shy person. Maybe this look irritates him – he’s confronted directly, which is more difficult, and so he goes away. And maybe, because he works in archives, he doesn’t have to deal with people very much, just with records, papers, documents. It’s a quiet, lonely job, he has not much to do with people. He is a bureaucrat. He has an abstract approach to the real – as many people have nowadays. And suddenly there is this person in front of him in a terrible, real situation. What do you do? And that is his failing, not to do, or not to know what to do. There starts the problem – why don’t we know what to do, why isn’t it a natural reflex to help? The man goes away. Then, the moment the woman jumps, he understands what is wrong.
Q.: How did you go about casting the lead actor? F. K.: Somebody told me about Egons Dombrovskis the main actor of Fallen (Krisana), so I met him, we met in a bar, talked, and I had a very good feeling about him and I asked him if he wanted to do it. I never saw him acting, I just liked him very much. He was a little surprised when I asked him, and he did it. I still like him a lot, and that’s important that after the work you still like the people you work with, and they still like you. Normally I don’t like to do this typical casting, where you get ten actors in, and the casting director is very arrogant, and it’s like a machine. For me, to meet a person, to sit in a bar, to have some drinks, to talk, and to see if you can relate to this person is very important. Because it’s basically a human being you have to work with - not an actor, but a human being, so it’s essentiell for me to have a relation to the person. This gives me the strongest image, and after this I decide if I want to work with this person. If I have doubts about his quality as an actor, I can make maybe some images with him, but normally I don’t, I decide very much from my heart. Q.: Can you talk about how Béla Tarr has influenced you? F. K.: Its very difficult, because I have known Béla for 15 years now, I have shot a film for him in 1995 (Journey to the Lowland), and I am also the DOP and operator for his new film The Man from London. When we first met we both had a feeling that we had pretty similar ideas about film, about images, and because of this a friendship started. We share a certain vision without having identical ideas or approaches. We are two different individuals though we have different but not opposite individual ways. Our communication is an easy one. From a certain point of view we are sitting in the same boat. If we like it or not. And we keep on rowing Q.: You rely a lot on long takes. Bazin suggests the use of long takes in the construction of a film creates realism… F. K.: I agree definitely. Time exists for us, because we are mortal. If we weren’t, time wouldn’t be a question. We don’t have time, that’s why time is a question, because our lives are limited. The fact that we are mortal, we experience time because we are mortal, there is a strong relation between time and death. I think when we observe time, somehow we observe death at work, the active aspect of death. Time passes, and it no longer exists. The longer people exist, the weaker they are, and they will die. In our mortal life and in film time is the only reality. Time structures our life, sculptures our life, like I said it’s close to music, and time sculptures film. It happens in time, and for me its very important to give an audience the feeling for time, and to recognise and experience time on itself. So when you observe a scene, you start to realise time exists, and it takes time to do certain things. And I like to show that the things happen, not just to give the information that they happen. So for example, if someone walks on the street, for sure to give the information that he walks on the street you can give it in two seconds, because today we live in a culture of video clips and fast images and we are able to understand very fast visuals that give information. But I think film, cinema, is not this kind of image factory with just information, that’s just for news shows on TV where they have to give everything fast. I think a film artist has to give something else, for example the experience of time. And the difference between giving the information of somebody walking, and letting the person walk, so you walk with him, rather than just get information. When I let him walk, you experience it. That’s the difference between experience and information. We are flooded with information today, but we don’t know so much because knowledge and information are something different, Knowledge comes from experience, and I think if I go with someone in a film for some minutes, I know what it means to walk, and I know from myself that when I walk a long time, it has to do with time, its quite meditative. Also I believe there is a certain moment when physical time transforms into metaphysical time, when the screen looks back to you, you are not only focussed on the screen, you start to think about yourself, things which you experience in your life which are similar with what you see on screen. So you are very much walking inside yourself, for example, when you walk with someone on a screen. These are possibilities, I don’t say that it works all the time, maybe for some people its quite boring, so that’s a risk, but I believe in it, and that’s why I take the risk. I think if we are open to a kind of cinema that doesn’t just give information with fast cuts, I think we can experience something, and I think the reason why some people avoid it is that its not always used, its boring or uncomfortable, and there is a fear of the uncomfortable, but an uncomfortable feeling can be good. When you give more than just information, it is yours, it’s your experience, which is very individual. Information belongs to everybody but experience belongs only to you. And I think that’s something which cinema can give to us. Also, when you work with time in this way, you somehow enter the documentary way of filmmaking, because you really observe the actor doing this, so if he has to go from the first floor to the third, you go with him, and he’s really doing it, the actor at this moment is doing it, so its him, a very strong reality. If I just show him taking two steps then cut, then take the camera upstairs, then ok, I know he went upstairs but I didn’t go with him upstairs, so he never gets any reality because I didn’t go with him. But when I go with him I see how he walks, I have to go through it with him, the time it takes to go from the first to the third floor, is the time which is given to me, where I can get the reality of the actor, who is a real living person. To cut from the first two steps to the last two steps has nothing to do with his realism. Q.: Do the actors find that difficult? F. K.: In the beginning, first because they are very much used to overacting, making big gestures and so on, and second, actors are very insecure and they feel if they don’t do anything they are not acting. Sometimes they say “but I’m doing nothing” and I say "but you stand in a very beautiful way, or it’s very nice the way you smoke a cigarette", and they say “But I’m not acting”. But it is something very personal that can be very beautiful, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling in the beginning, the feeling that they don’t do enough. Also they are used to rushing – in a conventional TV series they never have time to sit in a chair and smoke a cigarette then get up with the camera still following. So it is new for them, but after two or three days they adapted very easily. Most of the actors I worked with came from the theatre, and every theatre actor very much overacts in the beginning, but I took them down and down and down and quite fast they developed a sense for this limited way of expression, so, that’s mostly the way I work. Q.: This is a horrible question, really tragic, but what would be your best ‘advice’ to us as students? F. K.: I read a very funny interview some years ago with Werner Herzog, and he was asked what advice he would give to the students and he said “Don’t keep the curtain out of the bathtub when you take a shower, because then the floor gets full of water”. And that was his advice! It’s very difficult. There is no general advice, each of you is very individual and different, and I don’t know you, so… I think you should check your motives why you want to make films, because otherwise you will be completely disillusioned, and I think its important to know why you are doing it, and what you want to do, and which way you want to go, and if you know which way you want to go to keep it, if it’s a way you believe in. And even if everybody tells you to change, just trust yourself and your inner voice and do what you believe in, and don’t change it for some speculative ideas to serve a market or TV station or whatever if you don’t believe in it. It’s important not to be afraid, and not to follow other peoples ways that are not your own. I think it’s very difficult to find your own way, but if we listen inside ourselves, honestly, we know what we want to do, even if we are full of conflicts and doubts. The reason why some people lose their way is that they follow other voices, other thoughts, they start to create tactics – maybe if I do this, then I can reach this point. But this is not true, and I think then you lose your way. So just, be courageous, that’s what I feel. Have the courage to be yourself, to be authentic, even if it’s terribly difficult. Don’t give up, because I’m very sure if someone doesn’t give up and follows his artistic way, in some way he will succeed, because something that is authentic, is strong by itself, it cannot be killed or overheard. You follow your voice, your artistic way; it has a power by itself, automatically, because it’s true. And then maybe you can deal with the uncomfortable things that happen, the pain that waits, because it’s always difficult to follow your own visions, because many, many people want to destroy it, they don’t like it. There are many obstacles and problems, but to keep on and on even when it’s difficult, I think that is very important. Because if you do something that you don’t believe in, everything is wrong, it’s always weak – that is the worst that can happen to somebody, to be alienated from himself. |