»“WE ARE ALL CITIZENS OF THIS WORLD”

Interview with Fred Kelemen
by Magdalena Maksimiuk for the interview / article “CITIZEN OF THE WORLD”, KINO, May 2017
...................................................................................................................................................................
The leading personality of this year's New Horizons Film Festival retrospective in Wroclaw - Fred Kelemen - is a versatile artist. Probably due to his nature as an ambitious perfectionist, to maintain his equanimity, he has to contemplate and to survey all parts of the artistic process autonomously. He worked as a film and theatre director, script writer, producer, actor, editor, sound designer and cinematographer. In the latter occupation he made the films “The Turin Horse” and “The Man from London” together with Béla Tarr.
Fred Kelemen's cinema is moulded by passion and melancholy, light and darkness. Nonetheless, it is a very context-sensitive cinema, firmly anchored in a European consciousness. A cinema that explores the malady of the contemporary world, but from the perspective of individual persons and their environment. Magdalena Maksimiuk:
In your career as a filmmaker, you’ve worked in many roles, tried your hand at many positions on sets. Which role is closest to you? Do you even think of the limitations of each role or do they all somehow overlap for you?

Fred Kelemen:
From the beginning of my studies at the film school I practised almost all the crafts of film. I am a visual thinking person - I painted and photographed before entering the film school -, and so it was just natural for me to shoot my films and other directors' films as a cinematographer. In the films I directed, I did as well a lot of the sound design. Sound is a very important element of my films. And I did some small excursions in acting in films of other directors. For me the different crafts of film form a complete organism.

M. M.:
As a filmmaker you are known to be fond of improvising, you don't strictly follow the script. Where does that come from?

F. K.:
I work with a mix of precisely imagined and planned scenes and improvisation. I give a very clear frame. But inside the frame there is freedom and life can happen.
For me the script is like a cookbook rather than anything else. If you are cooking, you can of course follow the recipe line by line, but to perfect the dish you have to use your senses and taste to make your own decisions. If you just strictly follow the recipe it might not be as tasty as it could be, you should let go and start improvising. The script is a base. A very important one, but it's not a sacred text hammered in stone. You should throw away what blocks you or is not good enough and make space for something better which might appear. It is important to give life and the beauty of sudden inspiration a chance.

M. M.:
It seems that as a visual artist, you are fond of minimalism. Would you say it’s true and if so, what do you think is the source of this need to make things simpler, easier?

F. K.:
Yes, minimalism is something I look for. It is important for me to “essentialise”, to stylise and to focus on the archaic core of a phenomenon or topic. Everything unnecessary, superficial, I try to eliminate. I try to touch directly the bone marrow of reality.
There is a dramatic misunderstanding of reality in film nowadays, where superficial, sketchy naturalism is mistaken for realism. This is just the mere reproduction of the surface. The real reality glows beneath the surface.
There gleams as well the true beauty.
If we want to get in contact with the real, we have to get through the surface of the superficial naturalism and enter the deeper space of stylisation. The substantiality of reality is poetical.

M. M.:
Do you think there is still place in contemporary cinema for artists with a certain vision or has the cinema been taken over by box office ratings and superhero movies?

F. K.:
I think, the space for forms of alternative, self-determined artistic expression always exists as long as creative personalities are able to burst open these interstices in the seemingly massive mountain chains of our culture.
There are times when this needs more personal courage, strength, suffering and sufferance than in other times.
There is no neutrality in cultural things. Everyone has to decide what they are acting for.

M. M.: Are you willing to take risks in the kind of cinema you like to create? What would you call the most daring thing you did in a film?

F. K.:
What kind of risk? There is only one risk: to lose your life by not doing what you wish and should and love to do, by doing the wrong things instead of the right things, by not investing enough passion and love.

M. M.:
You are called a very “European” director because you've worked in many places around the continent, without sticking to one particular place on the map. Do you feel that way yourself too?

F. K.:
I am a European. I do not see myself as a national director or cinematographer.
I was born in Europe and I live here, brought up in this culture and tradition, which established my being and my thinking, so I feel very European. It is part of my nature. That said, I do not limit myself to one country or one nation. It is not difficult for me to work in different countries and to talk with people from different countries. I shot my film “Nightfall” in Germany and in Portugal. “Fallen” was shot in Latvia, in Riga. “Sarajevo Songs of Woe” was shot in Bosnia, of course, and I shot in Hungary, Israel and elsewhere. As long as the location is inspiring for me and it appeals to me cinematically, creating a certain tension and ideas - I can shoot anywhere. My home is the world. I am a cosmopolitan. I was never interested in the limiting, imprisoning idea of nationalism, which is a feudalistic and imperialistic concept of the 19th Century. Quite primitive as a vision for a world of different cultures, regions, ethnics etc. Totally disastrous. I realistically believe in unity in diversity and the respect of differences while acknowledging the connecting similarities as human beings and mortal beings.
We are all citizens of this one world. Connected on several levels and not independent. Only a wrong, egocentric concept of what this life is and what our task and meaning as human beings are can lead to discrimination based on national, racial, religious, social, cultural, sexual etc. differences. Every kind of discrimination is basically fascistic, antihuman and unacceptable. It serves the interests of power and material advantages of certain cliques but not the progress of humanism and the general quality of life. It bears the seed of destruction inside. It is an ideology of death. We have to stop being at war with people who are different, with animals, with nature. We have to stop being at war; otherwise there will be no felicitousness for us.

M. M.:
You have also shot in Poland, haven’t you?

F. K.:
I actually shot one scene for “Nighfall” just beyond the Polish-German border on the Polish side of Görlitz/Zgorzelec. But it was a rather short experience at that time. Once, when I was looking for a location for “Nightfall”, I was travelling in Germany, in the Czech Republic and Poland. I had a very nice trip. I remember one particular event from that time. On precisely the day of Ascension of Christ, I was driving from Berlin to Szczecin. The whole landscape was illuminated by a special twilight when I was passing through a small town in Poland. The façades of the houses were quite dark and the light gave them a gloomy, shining look. Then suddenly a group of young girls appeared in the street wearing very white, very bright dresses. It was an extremely strong, powerful image - the dark atmosphere of this industrial area, with a factory somewhere in the background, and the girls in there brightly shining dresses crossing the bridge over a black river. A very powerful image indeed.

M. M.:
Has your view on cinema changed with time, having more and more experience and also having been teaching for a while?

F. K.;
My view deepened but it did not change.

M. M.:
What can you say about the importance of location for the films you work on? Can you give particular examples of the films you worked on where location and sense of location was vital for the story? Do you consider location from a point of view of a DoP or a director?

F. K.: I am not a split personality. So I watch a location with my eyes and some other fine sensors, and I judge it regarding its photogenic qualities, visual, scenic and technical possibilities etc.
In all films I shot, the locations played an important part. The location is an essential element of the image. And every part of the image matters.
Film is a visual art. My mind is full of images.

M. M.:
Do you discuss the films you shoot with your friend and longtime collaborator Bela Tarr? Can you describe your relationship?

F. K.:
Béla and I, we are collaborators, artistic comrades-in-arms and friends. But up to now I did not discuss the films I shot with Béla.

M. M.:
Do you think your late friend Susan Sontag would appreciate your latest film “Sarajevo Songs of Woe”?

F. K.:
I hope so.

M. M.:
How did you and Susan Sontag meet, how can you describe your relationship and would you say she somehow influenced your work or perhaps the other way around?

F. K.:
When I had screenings of my film “Fate” at the MoMA in New York, Susan knew about my stay there and somebody delivered to me her wish to meet me. By phone we agreed a meeting for breakfast in her apartment. We talked about many essential, relevant things. This was our first meeting and from this moment on we stayed in contact. We wrote e-mails to each other or we had talks by phone. Whenever I was in New York we met. When I had my retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, she visited every screening every evening. After we went to eat soup in a nearby restaurant. Then we shared a taxi driving each of us to our different homes. It was our nightly ritual for this time.
A few weeks after this retrospective in New York I saw her for the last time on the occasion of her birthday dinner in Berlin. Her death was a painful shock for me. It left a gap that never closed. I do not see anyone being able to fill the blank space she left intellectually, ethically, on a human level and on the level of elegance and nobility of her mind.
She was a very important ally of my work.
And she is still a lighthouse, a light signal in the dark. She did not influence my work but she strengthened my attitude, she is a request to continue the way faithfully and firmly. She is a demand that should be fulfilled.

M. M.:
On the set of “Sarajevo Songs of Woe” you worked as a director, a screenwriter, a producer, editor and DoP. You must have been extremely busy. Can you tell me about this experience of managing all these roles?

F. K.:
When I started making films already in the film school, I did many jobs on sets. I also shot many projects as the cinematographer for different fellow students when I was studying. Sometimes I helped others out by working as a set designer of their films or as a sound recordist on set. I even participated as an actor in some films. As well after school I always tried to develop other skills that might be useful in the filmmaking process. So since my studies I was used to working in different positions and during the years I built up a certain system or method of work which allows me to be e. g. the director and the cinematographer or Director of Photography of a film at the same time.

M. M.:
Can you tell me who were these people working with you on the set of the film? Do they work in film as cinematographers on an everyday basis?

F. K.;
Some of them were - and still are - young cinematographers from different countries who worked in several projects before.
They participated in two cinematography workshops at the Talent Campus of the Sarajevo International Film Filmfestival I gave in 2014 and 2015. The other members of the crew are Bosnians who have worked as professionals in film for many years.

M. M.
In “Sarajevo Songs of Woe”, apart from very particular locations, you collected a magnificent ensemble cast. Where did you find these young actors?

F. K.:
The actors I casted at the Talent Campus for actors at the Sarajevo Film Festival. They are from different countries as well, like Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Hungary.
The main actress of the first part of the film is Iskra Jirzak from Croatia. After the shooting of her scenes in the film was finished, she came to support me shooting the remaining scenes and she returned to Sarajevo for the shooting of the third part of the film a year later, so in the end she was not only an actress but as well my assistant director. Both activities she did wonderfully.
During the shooting a little family of people working together was created, that’s why this project is really special and close to my heart.

M. M.:
What was so special about that particular place that made you think about the whole backstory, about the certain ideas you mention?

F. K. :
Actually this is something I cannot really explain. Sometimes I see, I experience locations which start to create certain images in my mind because of their energy or aura. Some places are charged with a certain destiny, with the presence of the demon of the place, which can be a positive or a negative one.
The whole idea was born because of a certain location I saw in Sarajevo and it inspired me to a film scene.
I am talking about the children's playground which appears in the film three times.
I had the initial idea for the film some months before the shooting. I have been teaching at the Film Factory in Sarajevo for many years and so the places shown in the film were familiar to me. When I accidentally found this location - the children's playground - one day, I started to imagine certain filmic or cinematographic situations there and I continued imagining the whole line of events flowing from this moment in both directions, to the end and to the beginning of the imagined film.
All the knowledge I had about the place – the town and the country and the people, the past and the present - all this came together in an artistically creative, comprehensive process. A kind of mental, metaphysical alchemy.
And later I was interested in finding a way to narrate in a different way, to be able to bypass the conventional idea of one linear story from the beginning till the end and find a different approach. Finally, the idea of a filmic triptych rose up my mind.

M. M.:
“Sarajevo Songs of Woe” is a very visual project, an experience rather than a typical film.

F. K.:
I would add that until you have watched it on a big screen, you can’t say you have seen it at all. The only chance of really experiencing it is through a screening on a big screen. Only then can one really and profoundly enter the world I am talking about and show.
The film shows the attempt to live a dignified life in our contemporary world which is very difficult. It talks of the distinction between the desire for love and warmth and the coldness of our up-to-date civilisation.
Watching this film might be an unusual, demanding experience. But entering the cinema to watch a film should not mean watching a film but experiencing life.
...................................................................................................................................................................

KINO, Poland, May 2017