FILMSICK'S REVIEW OF "FATE" (1994, FRED KELEMEN)

Filmsick wrote in Thai about FATE (1994, Fred Kelemen). Here is my translation of what he wrote (with some added information). I translate it to contribute to the Contemplative Blogathon 2 at http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/ :

FATE (1994, Fred Kelemen, Germany, 80 minutes)

FATE is a graduation film of Kelemen. He directed it in 1994, and Susan Sontag, a famous writer, called it a wonderful film in her essay THE DECAY OF CINEMA.

The opening scene of FATE consists of many gloomy images of people on the streets. The camera leads us through the streets to watch old people, little children, vagabonds, some men and women. The camera seems to take us by the hand to guide us to watch human faces, before it pauses to stare at a man who is playing an accordion on a roadside. The camera stops wandering to focus on this man before it starts to follow him. This musician is hired by a guy to play an accordion in his private room, but the customer looks down on the musician because the musician is a Russian, and he forces the musician to drink vodka. The musician doesn’t fight back. He just leaves the customer’s room and walks into a glowing fountain to try to cleanse something which is inerasable. After that, he goes to see a woman, but the woman doesn’t allow him to get inside her room. He gets so angry that he breaks down her door and meets a male stranger in the room. He passes on his cruel fate to other characters. Then the camera shifts to focus on the woman, who wanders into the night with a half-naked body.

This film is shot on a video camera before transferred to 16mm film, so the images are very grainy and blurred as if it was shot long time ago. Some images look like pale shadows moving in the darkness, and darkness always embraces Kelemen’s films very tightly.

Kelemen usually made his films after long rehearsals with the cast, using just a rough script in the beginning. He let he cast share some opinions before the script was re-written in full details. After he was satisfied with the rehearsals and saw that the cast could take the film to the highest emotional point, he would start filming.

Kelemen said that he is against fast editing. In his opinion, an act of watching is not like watching a shot of a face, then a hand, then an eye. He thinks that an act of watching requires a long period of time, without unnecessary editing.

This 80-minute film only consists of twelve long scenes, and each scene depends on the power of the acting and the power of his expressionistic cinematography, while the camera rarely moves during a scene. Kelemen said that when you film a person in a room, if the person walks out of the room and you immediately cut away to another scene, then you treat that room as if it doesn’t really exist. Your film just presents the existence of human beings. But if you let your camera roll for a while to film an empty room, film it until the human atmosphere in the room fade away, you will start seeing that room as a real place, unconnected to human beings anymore. Human beings will become just something tiny in the vast universe. This way of filming is also a way to trace the marks left by human beings. It is like you sit on a chair, and then you stand up and walk away. If another person comes to sit on the same chair within a few seconds, that person will still feel the warmth in the chair, which is the result of your body temperature, though you have walked away from it. Kelemen tries to capture this kind of thing in his films. He intends to film an empty chair until the human warmth left in the chair fades away.

The situations in FATE are not unpredictable. The story seems to be very simple. It may look like a story told from an omnipresent viewpoint, with a satirical tone in the presentation of human failure. (Something in FATE may remind the viewers of some bad situations in Kieslowski’s films). But actually Kelemen’s point of view doesn’t focus on satirizing human weaknesses, but focuses on creating a universe of human failure. Therefore, human fate in this film is not a cruel joke of God, but it is the consequences of human’s own actions, the results of what we do to each other. This thing can be compared to the narrative strategy of FATE, which shifts focus from watching one character to another character.

Though FATE is full of pale, gloomy images, Kelemen said that he is attentive to every element of the film, including color which is a very important element in film. Making a movie is not just putting a camera somewhere to film anything, but you must choose very well for any color appearing in your films. FATE is filmed in color, but the technique of the film makes this film look like a monochrome film. This is not a black-and-white film, though it may look like one.

Characters in FATE don’t occupy spaces on the screen as if they are important people. The role of characters in this film is reduced to be just model of the movement of fate. This film doesn’t tell a sad story of a couple, but intends to show how a racist behavior of a man can lead to a serious assault of a woman, though that is not the end of everything. Men in Kelemen’s films are undependable, weak and try to cover up their weaknesses by being aggressive. Women in Kelemen’s films may look fragile and behave unreasonably, but they find a way to learn how to stand up on their own.

In the last scene of the film (the story of which happens in only one night), fate brings the main characters back together. The woman wakes up and doesn’t cry. She just puts on her clothes and walks on. We see her and the man walk further, being followed by a tractor which seems to be hungry for them. We see the couple and the tractor move out of the frame. The camera still doesn’t move. We begin to notice the movement of some dark shadows, causing by the clouds in the sky, in the pale, gloomy field. The couple never return into the frame. They leave the universe of unpredictable fate to stay on the screen.


--Filmsick also wrote a review of FALLEN (2005, Fred Kelemen, Latvia), but the review contains some spoilers. So some of you may want to read it after you have already seen FALLEN.
http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2007/12/filmsicks-review-of-krisana-fallen.html

--The original writing in Thai can be read from the link below:
http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2007/12/fred-kelemen.html

FILMSICK'S REVIEW OF "RAISED FROM DUST", A CONTEMPLATIVE FILM

--I have submitted Filmsick’s review of PHANTOM LOVE (2007, Nina Menkes) as a part of Contemplative Blogathon 2.
http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogathon-2008.html


This is my comment in Unspoken Cinema’s blog:
http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2008/01/roundtable-1-ccc-synopsis.html

This is a synopsis of THE KITE (2002, Aleksei Muradov, Russia) in TIME OUT FILM GUIDE, written by Geoff Andrew. I love this film a lot, but I think Andrew wrote this review by being conscious of different groups of his readers—those who love contemplative films and those who don’t.
http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/78797/The_Kite.html

“From the opening scene of an alcoholic boozing by night to the somewhat unexpected ending, this slow, sombre film refuses to make things explicit or easy for the viewer. The narrative shifts focus almost as much as the camera, demanding patience as it reveals only gradually what's going on or why. If anything, it's a vision of hell on earth: a couple row endlessly, drained by the difficulties of work and of caring for a disabled son. The film does finally reward the attentive viewer with revelations and moments of true tenderness, but it's probably a bit too gloomy and ungiving for most tastes.”


As for the kind of short review I like, I like what my friend Filmsick wrote for RAISED FROM DUST (2006, Gan Xiao Er, China) in his most favorite film list of 2007 in a Thai website (www.onopen.com) , because it’s the review which makes me know instantly that this is a must-see film for contemplative film lovers, though he may use some words which may seem like a warning for those who don’t love contemplative films.


I tried to translate his review from Thai into English here. My translation is not 100 % accurate compared to his Thai review:

“This film is about a poor woman who has a sick husband staying in a hospital and a daughter who can’t pay tuition fees. What’s surprising is that the film contains no melodramatic scene. This is a low-budget film, full of static shots and stillness. The images seem to be transfixed by the empty atmosphere of rural China. Every scene is so natural, so life-like and so long that it can be a torture. The film is like a documentary without an ounce of sentimentality. We rarely see a close-up scene of the heroine. The story doesn’t seem to move forward. There is no music. Even in the climactic scene, we can only hear a sound of the wheels from her vehicle. This is not a kind of slow-but-deep films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s, nor a kind of slow-bittter-humorous films as Tsai Ming-liang’s. But this is a film of stillness and silence which is extremely hurtful and powerful.”