Kelek
In Wolf Donner's opinion (Die Zeit Oct. 17 1969) the subject of Werner Nekes' Kelek is the cinema audience's usual attitude: "At first the film seems abstract, without any meaning. We experience a walk through a park, ending in a still in front of bushes, An adventure film's dramaturgy is called upon, tension created, yet nothing actually happens. After that, from a basement, an almost unending shot through a grid (Kelek, a Turkish word, meaning raft or grid). We, the audience, the voyeurs, are in the basement, behind the bars of our viewing habits, our usual expectations.
At last pedestrians walk over the grid, the angle of vision changes: women's legs, walking or cycling, seen from above. Occasionally a leg opens the waved line of a coat seam, sometimes a fold slides between a pair of legs. Slowly the view of a street is faded in and out again. An optical illusion lets the buildings which leave a small opening to the sky move apart and back together again. Finally, the sexual act itself, prepared for by preceding scenes, shown in negative yet in all desired clarity. Up to now the cinema has been noisy, many have left, or vented their annoyance by interruptions, now, however, there is perfect silence: a film about the public and its reactions. Nekes records these reactions during the show and uses them for future projects.
The sex scene alternates with pulsating takes of the street, invaded then and again by automobiles. lnbetween the grid is shown, this time by a camera panning backwards and forwards. We want (and ought!) to escape from the prison of our false reactions and deductions. We must free ourselves from the constraints of the cinema we are used to.
At the end there is a long, still shot of the street, and we see the grid from above. People are walking, cars driving, children playing and posing in front of the camera: after the catharsis, the calm and pure view of a normal street."
Werner Nekes: "An adventure film about a sexual neurosis, that is resolved into what everyone likes to have and to do. Kelek turns the spectator into a participant. The many different psycho-perspectives are not experienced by a voyeur on the screen, rather the audience itself becomes the voyeur in the theater. Kelek, the raft on the Tigris is a symbol for Life, or for the perspectives I choose. Through the beams of the raft one sees the river, and what floats by is the film."
 |
