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Dear Elem Klimov,

I wanted to write to you for a long time. I didn't manage to for a long time. Now it's too late.

Life's last secret, death, has revealed itself to you.

The idea of sending you a letter first came to me about eight years ago, when I asked Andrej Plachov about you and learned how badly you were doing. Hidden away in your Moscow flat, at the mercy of your despair, I wanted to appeal to you not to lock away your precious soul in darkness, but to take up the fight and to keep on working on your wonderful art. I never imagined that it could be a rescuing letter, you can't save another person, but I hoped it could be a sign from a world so far and yet so near from someone whose existence you had never been aware of, who nevertheless lived with you in this time on this earth, who only once fleetingly crossed your path, but in whose soul your work has left a deep impression. That was over 15 years ago on the occasion of a retrospective of your films in the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. I saw your films there for the first time and heard you speaking about them. For hours after the showing of “Come and see” (“Komm und sieh”, the title of your film “Idi i smotri” translated into West German), I couldn't say a word. No feature film has burnt the pain of war so deeply and inextinguishably into the souls of many people. And in no film was the eternally precious idea of mercy so impressively shown as in the scene where the boy, terribly scarred by the horror of war, doesn't shoot at the picture of Adolf Hitler as a child.

It was especially your films, and the moral responsibility accepted and taken on by you that stands behind them, which were decisive for me in wanting to make films and in developing a belief in the mythical power and social necessity of this art.

Every film is political, since the question of moral responsibility is put to every director. Not everyone answers it with your courage and consistency, not everyone accepts it. Not everyone possesses this stance which is visible in every image, in every scene, which reveals its reality and leads to that rare aesthetic of spirituality which is also an aesthetic of humanity. The awareness of the danger threatening you and of its increasing obliteration in the market's stifling war for profit, which continues to wipe out everything tender, still and valuable in man, without being able to create lasting values, and which too many have already joined, can at some time lead to a grief that turns to despair and is fatal. Even though resistance is hard and often seems hopeless, it can and must and will be put up again and again, as long as there are people who carry inside them that indispensable knowledge of the secret of the sacredness of their art and life. “When nothing is sacred any more, there is no more protection for our souls. Then our souls will live in this world unprotected. We will become soulless. For us it is healing when we give holiness a place in our lives” (A. Grün). The cinema could be such a place. And your films have always transformed the cinema into a holy, healing place. The greatest healing of our souls is probably achieved through its shock.

Dear Elem Klimov, your cinema of shock shouldn't have reached an end. But lots of things happen that shouldn't. You shouldn't have been allowed to die, either.

Fred Kelemen

Berlin, 29 th October 2003