» THE DARKNESS OF LIGHT. Interview by Paul and Dan Cantagallo
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Back in college, we don’t remember quite how, but we found ourselves in a small dark repertory theater in Cambridge, MA watching a presentation of moving images so exquisite, bewitching, and sublime we felt like we’d been transported directly into some state suspended between pure transcendence and spiritual exhaustion. The film that provoked that unforgettable cinematic experience was fashioned by legendary Hungarian-German filmmaker and cinematographer Fred Kelemen, and the film’s title was NIGHTFALL (1999). After that, we found ways to watch Kelemen’s other, unfortunately hard-to-find films, FATE (1994), FROST (1998), and FALLEN (2005). His work and aesthetics had much in common with another great European auteur we’d lately become obsessed with: Bela Tarr. These two dark and brooding cinematic “discoveries” of ours were compounded a few years later when Kelemen collaborated with Bela Tarr as the cinematographer on THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007) and again on Bela Tarr’s latest and possibly final film, TURIN HORSE (2011). And although Bela Tarr has rather famously retired from filmmaking because he’s fed up, Fred Kelemen continues to write and direct films and plays. Thinking what-the-hell, we reached out to Kelemen recently to request an interview for FUGITIVE. The only thing more amazing than receiving his warm response to our query was reading his thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to our interview questions. Here they are:

Before your career as a filmmaker, you studied music, painting, and philosophy among other things. What led you to cinema and the moving image?
Love. Simply my love for the moving image.

You have described your approach to shot composition as involving something called “the thinking image.” Could you describe what that means?
The movement of the camera evokes the moving image, evokes the movement of the cinema eye through space, evokes the passing of time eye–witnessed by the viewer. The movement of the image is similar to the movement of thoughts floating from one thought to another. And especially the connection the camera-eye creates between fragments by moving from one fragment — which is in the same tine the whole of an image — to another fragment, evokes a new idea, a meaning, sense. It is the poetry of the creating movement of the cinema-eye, it creates the world while moving. It is the dance of the camera and the world around which is in the same moment cinematographically created when it is photographed. And this is similar to our thoughts; they move, and thinking we create the world. This explains hopefully what I call the thinking image. It is the image which creates the world instead of just recording and depicting it.

Which filmmakers have most influenced your style of cinema?
The most influence comes from life itself (the total of what I experienced from childhood until now), from music (the flow and organisation of time) and from paintings (the movement patterns of light and shadow). These are the best sources for fulfilling the tasks the film art demands me to fulfill.

Which filmmakers are you most excited about at the moment?
My dead, immortal, always valid heroes from the past. And currently Asia Argento.

If you wanted to demonstrate to a stranger the power of cinema as you understand it, which three films would you recommend he or she watch?
Today, I would say “Naked Island” (director: Kaneto Shindô, cinematography: Kiyomi Kuroda), “Mouchette” (director: Robert Bresson, cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet). “Passion” (director: György Fehér, cinematography: Gábor Medvigy). And for the colours “The Conformist” (director: Bernardo Bertolucci, cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro).

How has technology affected your approach to filmmaking? How has it affected filmmaking in general?
Well, film art is, as any art, bound to its significant technologies. The development of the technical tools of course changes the way of expression. If you remember how the old studio film was shot with big, heavy cameras and how that made movements and shooting at original locations impossible, and how, due to different technical equipment, shooting at original locations and the moving camera later became possible, you see clearly how technology has an influence on filmmaking. The abovementioned change was by the way the most important change in the short history of film–this, and the related invention of the steadicam. The other big change happens with the aggressive establishing of digital technology along with the extermination of film material. By losing the photo-chemical image we lose the light and, with this, the darkness and the shadows. The digital image is only able to create a fake. So we replace the real by a fake. By losing the light and its variations up to the dark, we lose much more than a technical medium, we lose something metaphysical, magic, essential. The replacement of the real by the fake is deeply political because it is another step of capitalism towards absolutism and the dictatorship of the so-called “market.” The situation is truly dramatic. And everyone should fight for the defense of the richness of variety by fighting for the film material not to be exterminated. Damn those who destroy cinema. The space to narrate in certain, individual ways has to be captured by passionate fights again and again.

Do you try to create mystery with images or do you try to capture it instead?
I do not try to create, I create. The act of creation is a mystery itself. And while creating gates open and a mysterious stream of love, passion, obsession, pain, sensuality, fragility, clairvoyance carries me deeper into this darkness of light where sometimes we touch for a moment the hem of the skirt of what is real and true.

Do you work with a script or any other form of written material when preparing and shooting a film?
A script is a cookbook, not a bible. A script is as helpful and valuable as a cookbook is. And I use it as such. In the end it is the cook who matters and it is the dish we eat, not the cookbook.

In 1995, Susan Sontag wrote an article, “The Decay of Cinema,” that singled out your films as particularly outstanding examples of cinema in her analysis of the death of cinephilia. Since that time, has it been harder to make your style of films?
It definitely became more difficult to get financing for films which are not primarily serving the degrading commercial market but the wonderful, colourful bazaar of ideas, forms, film languages, and creative capabilities.
Those who want to create — instead of producing stuff for an entertainment industry which provides their conformist junkies – need firmness and a believe in the value and dignity of genuine artistic expression as a liberating essential human act.

What is the state of the cinema in your opinion?
Due to the shrinking variety of technical possibilities, the extermination of the film material, etc., and a growing inflation of confectioned images, which enlarges the desert of lacking individual, personally urgent, independent, wild, nonconformist expression, the art of film is in lethal danger similar to an animal species threatened by extinction.
The cinema has lost its avant-garde. And this loss will come to effect the mainstream as well. Every art needs an avant-garde to develop, the centre nourishes itself from the edges, the mainstream is enriched by the avant-garde. An art without a strengthened avant-garde will die. If the economic aspect is the only value of a film to be produced instead of the artistic and spiritual one, if film as a product to sell is more important than its artistic, cultural, human and mental relevance, the art of film loses its soul and finally its life.

What current project are you working on?
It is a secret. Sorry.
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Fugitive Cinema, USA, 13 July 2013, www.fugitivecinema.com