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Nightfall | Text: Richard Falcon | Sight and Sound, October
2000 Germany/Portugal 1999 / Dir Fred Kelemen If film historian Thomas Elsaesser is correct in recognising in the New German Cinema of the 70s "the depressive disposition of a whole generation", then young German film-maker Fred Kelemen is undoubtedly heir to this disaffected sensibility. Like his earlier two films, Fate (1994) and Frost (1997), Nightfall makes almost tangible a nocturnal urban world of utter desolation, one that's far removed from Hollywood's prosaic cityscapes. The earlier two films built on Kelemen's fine-art credentials (he studied painting); they were less interested in narrative (both consist of a loose assembly of sequences) than in creating moments of stark, visionary beauty. Nightfall initially holds out the promise of a narrative with a circumscribed timescale - beginning with a row between a co-habiting couple, Anton and Leni, which sends each out individually into an anonymous city. But the terms on which this long night of the soul are conducted are deliberately occluded. Their plight is existential and universal; the spectre of 'The Death of Love' which hovers over them isn't the kind to be exorcised by a trip to Relate. The film opens with an extremely slow tracking shot down a squalid office corridor flanked by silent people of all ages in a state of advanced despair. This shot is intercut with jittery close-ups (captured on video) of faces lost to hope. Throughout Nightfall, Kelemen juxtaposes lengthy long shots on film and extreme close-ups on video, a technique which conveys a deeply oppressive contrast between individual neurosis and despair, and a hostile environment. Kelemen's rigorous formalism achieves a complex mix of emotional involvement with the images and distance from his characters. An obsessive recurring visual motif, revealed by slow tracks outwards from a detail within the image, features the characters separated from each other by glass, by bars or by frames within frames. Such devices have led to comparisons with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who, in the words of Claude Chabrol, treated his characters like "insects under glass". But Kelemen is less interested in the minutiae of internalised social oppression, as Fassbinder was, than in using the materials of cinema to make palpable a feeling of emotional paralysis. Unemployment here is literally a "plague", like lovelessness, blighting the infernal city; in one remarkable sequence, the camera, filming from behind the window of a moving tram, impassively looks on at Anton being set upon by muggers. Small gestures heighten the contrast between the characters' desire for love and the brutality of their environment: the moment when Leni places her hand on the glass that separates her from Anton as he watches her work, for instance, finds an echo in the scene where she has degrading sex in the back of a john's car. Happiness, it seems in Nightfall, exists at one remove, almost on a screen within a screen: as Leni stares out of the window during her row with Anton, a ship adorned with fairy lights passes in the background, out of focus, and sounds of a party drift in and out. It is an image which could collapse into bathos or unintended comedy were it not for the duration of the shot and the care with which it has been constructed. Like the later sequence in which Anton returns a stranded swan to the river, this scene is less a scriptwriter's metaphorical embellishment than the distillation of Kelemen's boldly experimental approach to cinema. At one point, Anton hoists a bell founder he befriended into a massive bell and uses him as a human clapper. It is perhaps Nightfall's most striking episode, one that belongs to Kelemen's singular vision, but is also reminiscent of Werner Herzog's quasi-mystical sense of image-making and the nightmarish metaphors that feature in Kafka's fables. In keeping with the cinema's avant-garde tradition, Nightfall suppresses those elements which have become dominant in mainstream film, namely, action and montage. The painstakingly composed long takes shift emphasis on to both the soundtrack - notably, Rainer Kirchmann's music, but also snatches of diegetic sound such as the noise an unseen one-armed-bandit machine makes in one of the bars Anton frequents - and the slow, deliberate, often unmotivated camera movements. The rare occasions when characters' actions dictate the camera's movement only increase our sense of unease - the way the sinister leather-coated figure reverses the camera's slow track in the opening sequence, for instance, or the pan which reveals the audience staring at the little girl on the pool table, one of whom raises a camcorder to his eye. Like the pimp Paul's car (in which Leni has sex), the camcorder is one of the few intrusions modernity makes into Kelemen's anachronistic European city, a place of cobbled alleys and comfortless bars, in whose shadows lurks a sense of medieval depravity. ....................................................................................................................................... |