» The end is nigh... or is it? | Guardian Unlimited | Friday April 2, 1999
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The end is nigh... or is it?

The 1990s have been a hell of a decade for cinema - an apocalyptic decade, you might say. This is when hard-core art cinephiles have been gazing into the embers and proclaiming the death of the art form. The end of cinema is nigh, declare some; no, the jig's already up, reckon the real doomsayers, and has been for some time.
According to this viewpoint, feeling pessimistic about cinema isn't simply a matter of sitting through, say, A Night At The Roxbury in consecutive weeks and suffering popcorn dyspepsia. It's more basic - to do with feeling that cinema's language has become so deadened, so unable to invent new ways to communicate, that we might as well give up on the game, and go back to the pleasures of a challenging read.
But even some hardcore Cassandras occasionally see glimmers of hope. A few years ago, Susan Sontag wrote a piece that bemoaned what she saw as the death of serious cinephilia, but which named a few hard auteurs offering hope for the future. One was Russia's Alexander Sokurov, director of Mother And Son, whose vaporous mysticism isn't to everyone's taste (watching his films, I'm never sure whether to snigger or burst forth in Slavic lamentations). Another was Hungarian director Bela Tarr whose seven-hour Satantango is one of those rarities that cinephiles trump each other with in festival bars.
But another name in Sontag's canon can be seen at London's Lux Cinema next week - the young German director Fred Kelemen. His short (80 minutes) 1994 film, Fate (Verhängnis), lives up to its solemn title: it's less a straightforward narrative than a series of sequences. A man sits playing accordion; another man approaches him and they converse in a language you can't at first make out. Then we're at the second man's flat: he seems to be Spanish or Latin American, and he's hired the first man, who's Russian, to play tangos for him; when the Russian has reached the point of exhaustion, he's coerced into drinking an entire bottle of vodka. He staggers to the apartment of a Russian woman; there's another man there. A nasty confrontation ensues. And so on . . . Things get increasingly nightmarish until they trail off at the end of the night in the final, quietly devastating image - two figures trudging down the road while a forklift lumbers slowly after them.

Fate is either a dream, or absolute sardonic realism. There's a certain inverse glamour to Kelemen's images: shot on Hi-8 transferred to 16mm, the picture is barely readable at times, as if in an advanced state of decay, or like a half-remembered nightmare. We're just aware of events taking place before our eyes, but because everything happens in such extremely long takes, we're never sure whether the camera is controlling the actions or is simply hovering as an invisible (but nevertheless very tangible) observer.

Fate seems to divide viewers. Some people feel it's glib and banal, misogynistic, a gratuitous wallow in the abyss, that the only possible reaction to Kelemen's abject panorama is, "So what?" Yet because Fate is the sort of film that it is - it's so sparing, it doesn't tell us what terms it wants to be taken on - we accept it or we don't. But if we do, it's pretty much up to the viewer to bring to life a film so apparently inert and unyielding.

Kelemen's film makes similar demands to much modern art: the intransigent "it is what it is" is a rare quality at a time when most cinema, even art cinema, is careful to let you know exactly what you're seeing, for fear of scaring you away.

Opinions are also divided over which is the better of Kelemen's two films. Admirers of Fate seem to be lukewarm about his second film, the three-hour Frost - a slow, almost wordless travelogue in which a woman and child cross a forbidding winter landscape. Personally, I'd say that Fate is Kelemen getting into his stride, while Frost goes the full nine yards, achieving a sense of mythic space, and probing more deeply into the German cinematic imagination. In its images of nocturnal low-life, Frost is the one that really lives up to the claims made for Kelemen as an inheritor of Fassbinder (although arguably he's closer to the arch-pessimist Werner Herzog).

After last year's British festival screenings, you probably won't see Frost again in a hurry because of Kelemen's dispute with the film's producer. But Fate gives you a sense of his chilly mindset. I won't say it's a film guaranteed to start arguments, because it's just as likely to cause mystified, taciturn shrugs. But that's one of the things about what Sontag might call the "hard cases" of cinema - sometimes you just aren't sure whether a new discovery signals a shining road ahead, or a darkly alluring dead end.

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Text: Jonathan Romney