»"WHO NEEDS DRILLED MONKEYS?"

Interview with Fred Kelemen by Vasily Koretsky, Colta, Russia

Cinematographer, director and academic Fred Kelemen talks about his vision of what and how should be taught at a film school.

Text: Vasilij Korezkij

Starting with the new semester, the Moscow School of New Cinema opens a "laboratory" lead by Fred Kelemen, cinematographer (of the last films by Béla Tarr among others), director and academic.
He teaches at the dffb (German Film and TV Academy Berlin) and at the "film.factory", the film school established by Béla Tarr in Sarajevo. Vasilij Korezkij talked with Fred Kelemen about his teaching method, about new aesthetics and about the phenomena of time in film.
................................................................................................................................................................... Vasily Koretsky:
Speaking of the current state of cinema (total digitalization of shooting and projection, widespread practice of watching movies on the small screens) can we say that this media, as we knew it in the XX. century, is almost gone, being replaced by something analogous, lookalike, but essentially different? Or is this statement too radical?

Fred Kelemen:
It's not radical, it's simply true. But the statement of this fact alone does not mean anything. The interesting step would be to understand what the fact of this change implies.
The loss of the film material is more than than just losing the film material, it means the loss of a certain quality of the image, the loss of a certain beauty. The digital technique is not able to capture and to represent light in the way film does due to the photo-chemical process. The digital technique only produces a fake light, something which only looks like light. The reason is the technical reality of the digital image. So what we lose with losing the film material is the light; and thus the darkness.
It makes no sense to make digital look like film, because it never will. But it could be interesting to find a new aesthetic, a new special digital aesthetic. With the size of digital cameras, which are quite small, you could invent completely new ways of movement. There’s no need to copy the conventional way of shooting. Some movements are dictated by the heaviness of the film camera, but there are different possibilities if you work with a small digital camera. Digital should be used independently of anything that is film, in a liberated way – like something new. In the past, all newly invented techniques led to new forms, new expressions. Strangely, with digital this hasn’t really happened yet. A technical innovation should lead to an artistic innovation. And not to the production of fakes.

V. K.:
So do you have any specific theory or ideas about the possible ways of further evolution of the audio-visual narrative media? And I wonder if any kind of attempt to forecast the future of the so-called "cinema" is relevant today, when the technological development is always in advance of the human mind trying to grasp the socio-cultural impact of such a development.

F. K.:
No, I have no theories and it's not relevant to speculate about future technologies. We are living today and we should try to deal with the present possibilities and problems. The present is the ground from which the future grows.
Let's not speculate. Let's be open and look, let's watch what is realised already and which existing potential can be used in a good way to preserve the qualities we have. The film material is such a quality. And it should not be replaced by the digital image, which has a so much lower quality.
The loss of the film material, the celluloid, is more than just the disappearance of a material as I elucidated before, and we should fight to defend it from being eliminated.

V. K.:
As far as I know, you started teachihg students not long after you finished your tuition, being younger that some of your students. I suppose that your teaching method was non-authoritarian but on contrary emancipating. Am I right? Can you please define core principles of your teaching method and how it evolved through the years.

F. K.:
Art is not created by drilled or trained monkeys but by independent, courageous, bold, sensitive, passionate, non-conformist individuals who love their art. So my method is to strengthen certain qualities, to provoke certain experiences, to point a light on certain aspects, to ask certain questions. I try to open closed gates on each individual's very personal way but the steps through these gates each one has to go on his or her own. V. K.: Can you be a little more precise and name such an experiences and formulate maybe the most crucial of these questions? I guess it is all personal, but some conditions are without a doubt imposed on filmmakers from the outside, by industrial, cultural, technological restrictions or demands - even when we speak about so-called "art cinema". And by the way, do you find this term "art cinema" still relevant? F. K.: I don't care about terms. I care about qualities. It doesn't matter how you label a film. What matters is if it touches you on a deeper level, on a level where it connects with your human existence beyond categories. If you are a filmmaker who desires to create a shocking true human moment with the means of this wonderful art of film, instead of producing conformist fakes and repetitions of clichés and illusions and lies, then you have to devote yourself to walking a path of learning, of looking and listening and deepening your knowledge of life, yourself, the others and the tools of this art intellectually, intuitively, metaphysically and physically, i.e. concerning craftsmanship.
These tools can be trained, the sensibility can be trained, the ability of looking and listening can be trained, the cinematographic sense can be trained, all what can make you enter deeper into this art and use its elements in a more perfect, expressive, comprehensive way can be refined: Through experience. And this space of experience is what I open for and enter with the students. I lead them into the labyrinthine cave of their own being and the reality of this art and I give them Ariadne's thread before entering it step by step.
And this space of experience of the reality of your own personality and the art of film has nothing to do with labels, categories or industrial, cultural, technological demands or restrictions. It has to do with the freedom of creativity.

V. K..:
While teaching, do you see yourself as a researcher of some kind, presenting the audience the results of your nonstop research or more as a craftsmen, passing a set of certain skills?

F. K.: They cannot be separated from each other. What you discover, what you detect and recognise has to be manifested in a concrete way which needs as well a skillful use of the artistic, intellectual and technical tools.

V. K.:
Speaking about the tools – what do you mean by skillful use of them? Do you mean some kind of an industrial or wide-recognized criteria of quality like those of the Old Hollywood? Or do you mean more a kind of cognitive-sciences-related laws of perception and the ways of affecting the spectator to provoke the proper emotional response?

F. K.: A skillful, successfull use of the tools is realised when your are able to master the tools serving your intention in expressing your content on the level of communication and artistic presentation in the most complete way. V. K.: Do you see cinema as a mimetic or as a romantic, presenting rather ideas/concepts than phenomena forms of art. And does your concept of cinegraphic moment correspond to the surrealists' concept of "convulsive beauty" or concept of a "found art"?

F. K.:
A presentation of ideas and a phenomenological description of realities - which includes emotions - are connected in my art. I describe what I observe and I reflect about the meaning of it. And both, the description and the reflection are forming the concrete artistic work, the artefact.
The "cinegraphic moment" has nothing to do with any concept, it is a reality, it is the heart of the art of film. As I wrote, the "cinegraphic moment" is the totality of the poetry of the presence of body and time - of manifestation and transience, of fragility and eternity.

V. K.:
Speaking about the time - the cinema is for sure a time-consuming art - as well as videoart. But videoart - I mean any sort of a visual projection in the gallery space – usually works with a very specific form of time, lets call it "wasted" or maybe "blank" time, the time passing almost physically in boredom. On the other hand cinema in its conventional form tries more to disguise this deadly passing of time - by narrative, attractions etc. But I guess your films (I mean films shot with Béla Tarr as well as your directorial works) try to emerge this polar approach, following some kind of a third way. Am I right? If yes - is your way of presenting (I guess this is not a representation) the time on screen just the kind of a golden mean between these extremes of completely different approach? And can you describe it in a more deployed and detailed terms please?

F. K.:
I don't understand what you mean with your statement about video art. And I don't agree that time in video art passes in a boring way. But anyhow...
Film art is, as music and theatre, a child of Chronos. Time is probably the most mysterious of all phenomena of our life. It has an illusionary but real existence.
In time life and death are united. The fact that the duration of our physical presence in this world is limited and because of the idea we have about this limited existence, time exists. Time is a reality of our existence because we bestow reality to it, because we experience that life vanishes, that there is death, that living beings are mortal. Time is sculpturing our lives.
Because of the fact that we experience our life as mortal and hence finite, time has a reality for us. Independent of our thinking it doesn't own this reality, it doesn't exist; in eternity there is no time, in God there is no time. Time has a reality on our worldly, corporal, dualistic level only because we attribute it to it. We create reality on this earthly level through our illusionary thinking, through our concepts. Through the concept of our mortality, which physically really exists, we create the reality of time. But in fact beyond our mortality it does not exist.
Our idea of time would change if our idea of death as a force, which finishes and opposes life, were to change. The passing of time reminds us of death. We are afraid of it. Witnessing the passing time reminds us of death, of our mortality.
That's why in mainstream films the awareness of passing time, of the existence of time is avoided. Time is just the time of action without its own existence in these films. Time in these films is just the time it takes to do something or to say something. It doesn't have its own existence. There's no "empty" time, no pure time. In these films time doesn't get an independent physical presence and thus no metaphysical dimension. In my films time has its own physical presence of a metaphysical dimension, it exists independently of the duration of physical actions of the actors. And this presence of time is never without tension. It is time which exists like a funambulist's tightrope tensely stretched above the abyss of our fragile being in this world. It is time which flows around us like water flowing around a fish which moves in it. This time that I'm talking about is charged with energy because it is our life. And we should not be afraid of it but experience and savour it and make it luminescent.

................................................................................................................................................................... (Fred Kelemen, 2015 June 6 / Colta, 2015 July 31, http://m.colta.ru/articles/cinema/8118)