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fiba cinema essay 2006

The end of cinema is nigh
by Fred Kelemen
Friday September 29, 2006
The Guardian (London)


Abendland by Fred Kelemen

Reality is disappearing. We can bring the world into our homes with the television screen and internet, but we're only informed about it, we don't experience it. We have to decide whether we want to experience real life, even at the risk of being shocked by it, or we are just informed about it securely under cover. Frost by Fred Kelemen Film is not a medium. Film is an art and a language. Like every work of art, a work of film art is real; it's an artist's material, a substantial expression. And as for every art form, the type and means of presentation is one of its essential elements. Just as a theatre production only exists in the moment when it's performed, a piece of music only when it's played, a work of film art only wakes when it's projected on to a screen in a cinema. A strip of film rolled up in a can is sleeping a death-like sleep. Only through the speed and light with which its pictures are thrown onto the screen does it become the reality that is cinema, which lets the audience take part, enthralled in that dream-like life that touches and shocks him, that gets him to feel and think. Verh by Fred Kelemen In watching a film on video or DVD on a television screen we are simply receiving information about a film. It's like looking at a postcard showing a reproduction of a painting. Anyone who has seen one of Van Gogh's original paintings, anyone who has followed the brushstrokes and thus the hand and rhythm of his painting and thinking, will have had an experience that looking at a postcard of the same work can never give. There's a big difference between making a piece of clothing out of a fabric of high quality and that's best-suited to the pattern and making it out of polyester or plastic. Durvis-un-viss by Fred Kelemen Watching a film on video or DVD is like watching a plastic version. Film's essential parameters - time, rhythm, light, colour, sound, texture - are only maintained by projecting it as a film on to a screen. Squeezed into a television screen, these elements are no longer recognisable and thus vanish, which amounts to the film's heart being stolen. The perception of time is completely different on a television screen, whose surface can be taken in at a glance, and on a metre-wide screen. Time, film's essential element, is simply extinguished on a television screen, because it can't be experienced. This is one reason why I view a film projected on to a screen again and again during editing. The same goes for nuances in the image's sound, in its light and darkness and in its colour. Greizsirdiba by Fred Kelemen We are in a dilemma. And this is just one symptom of a deeper cultural and mental or spiritual crisis. In view of the shockingly poor availability of old and new films in the form of cinema projections, it's an expression of this dilemma that watching films on video or DVD seems to be the only possibility of saving them from disappearing completely, although their real heartbeat is probably broken down for ever. What remains is the hope that one day we could meet this or that film alive and well in the darkness of a cinema and be moved by it.

Born in Berlin (West) as son of a Hungarian mother and a German father,Fred Kelemen studied painting, music, philosophy, science of religions and theatre sciences and worked in different theatres as a director’s assistant before he began his studies at the German Film & TV Academy Berlin (dffb) in 1989. Since that time, he has made a number of films and videos as director and collaborated as Director of Photography and Cameraman with several film directors like Hectór Faver, Yesim Ustaoglu, Gariné Torossian and Béla Tarr. He directed several plays at different theatres in Germany and he is working as a guest ecturer at the Centre of Cinematographical Studies of Catalania (C.E.C.C.) in Barcelona/Spain, at the School of Visual Arts (ESBAG) in Geneva/ Switzerland and at the Latvian Cultural Academy (LKA) in Riga.

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