Born in Warsaw in 1941, Krzysztof Kieślowski occurred into cinema, by his personal account, on accident. He had at all times needed to be a theatre director however required the next schooling to grow to be one, so he tried enrolling in movie faculty since that was the sphere closest to his desired occupation. By the tip of the three years at movie faculty, Kieślowski had damaged up with theatre and fallen in love with documentary filmmaking. Kieślowski was interested in documentary filmmaking as a result of he needed to depict actuality precisely. Kieślowski made fourteen documentary movies for the subsequent decade, some with fictional parts. However, As the last decade ended, he distanced himself from documentaries and pivoted to fiction.
During the manufacturing of a tv documentary, “First Love” (1974), whereas filming an intimate second the dad shares together with his daughter, Kieślowski is struck by the obscene nature of his entire endeavor, how he had no proper to violate an actual particular person’s privateness like that. Hence, the moral limitations of documentary filmmaking marked his shift to fiction to get nearer to ‘depicting the truth.’
The following record ranks the characteristic movies of Krzysztof Kieślowski, the physique of labor he’s most identified for on the earth after his transition from documentary filmmaking to fiction. His documentary work is huge, obscure, and remarkably distinct from his fiction works, but he maintains a stable singular persona that deserves a separate record of its personal.
11. Blizna (The Scar, 1976)
Based on a brief story by Romuald Karas, who additionally wrote the screenplay with Kieślowski, “Blizna” is about an sincere communist cadre, Stefan Bednarz (Franciszek Pieczka), who genuinely needs to do good for his home-town, and believes in Communism, and the promise of the Party to do good for the individuals. Being a well-known native of his hometown of Olecko, he’s made the director of a manufacturing facility that has just lately begun development and should preside over its affairs. Vast stretches of forest are cleared on this primarily agricultural city to create space for establishing the manufacturing facility.
Riding in excessive spirits of fast industrialization and growth, he quickly finds himself at an deadlock when the locals current their resentment and unhappiness at what they see as outsiders’ intrusion of their completely blissful lives. A person of the individuals, Bednarz initially tries his greatest to be honest and tackle everybody’s grievances. Still, as discontent grows among the many individuals and stress from the Party who disagree with how he handles dissent, he finds himself in a delicate state of affairs with the dreadful feeling of shedding contact together with his important self and corrupting his soul.
The movie’s central battle is, naturally, CHANGE. By pitting conflicting views towards one another, this narrative terribly dramatizes the age-old philosophical downside: “What is ‘good’ and ‘bad’? How does one know? Who decides?” This battle is on the coronary heart of the auteur’s oeuvre, and later, “Dekalog” comes closest to offering a solution.
10. Przypadek (Blind Chance, 1987)
This film was made in 1981 however was not given a theatrical launch till six years later, in 1987. Kieślowski’s first movie below martial legislation was additionally his greatest head-on collision with the Censors, who outright blocked its launch and later put out closely censored variations. Witek, performed by Bogusław Linda, is a younger man who remembers even when he got here out of his mom’s womb. We see Witek develop up and make and lose buddies and girlfriends till he joins medical faculty. Upon his father’s demise, Witek loses his motivation to grow to be a health care provider, drops out of medical faculty, and decides to catch a practice for Warsaw. Having adopted in an easy method Witek’s life thus far, the film takes a uniquely Kieślowski-an flip, because it exhibits, in succession, the three paths and trajectories of Witek’s life based mostly on whether or not he caught the practice.
There are three variations of the identical story: one on the ‘this’ facet, one on the ‘that’ facet, and one on the skin. In all three variations, Witek longs to go away the nation. But at all times falls in need of doing so. In the primary occasion, when he’s organized to go to Paris with a Party delegation, their flight is canceled resulting from a strike. In the second model, Witek, now having related to not solely the Underground rebels but additionally a professed Catholic, is denied a passport by the authorities.
Then, within the third occasion, as a good-natured, career-driven, impartial outsider, he lastly makes the aircraft to Egypt for a medical convention when the aircraft explodes after taking off. In all of the three potential methods Witek’s life may’ve gone in, as a member of the Party, as a member of the Underground, and as a impartial, ‘apolitical’ outsider, Witek was fated to not depart the nation alive.
This film can then be seen as a pissed off cry of a claustrophobic artist who felt trapped in Poland’s inflexible, authoritarian authorities on the time. It is a continuing tussle between destiny and probability. The central query, after all, is whether or not issues occur for a goal, or perhaps a cause, or if there isn’t a bigger context or which means to them, and all life is ‘blind chance.’ Kieślowski first highlights and underscores the quick nervousness of the unsure political local weather of life below Martial Law whereas on the similar time undermining these political issues for a lot extra vital non secular and philosophical issues.
9. Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Riding excessive on the success of filming the Ten Commandments, Piesiewicz and Kieślowski reunited, this time in France, to movie the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. However, not like “Dekalog,” Kieślowski has unambiguously declared which movie corresponds to which worth. “Blue” is about Liberty. What does it imply to be free? Or moderately, what it means to be liberated on a private degree? Julie is the just lately widowed spouse of a preferred and well-respected up to date music composer. In some methods, she’s been given a brand new life, a liberty, to dwell her life as she needs, as a lot as she should mourn the demise of her husband and baby. This tender contradiction is so diligently and punctiliously portrayed all through the movie.
However, not like earlier Kieślowski movies, there’s little interference or assist from destiny. This is a rational world, not dominated by the Commandments of faith however by the beliefs of males, and one can’t assist however discover a powerful sense of irony that runs all through “BLUE.” We have no idea a lot about Julie’s husband or her baby, and we don’t really feel a lot about their brutal accidents both. All we find out about her husband is that he was a well-known music composer commissioned to jot down a Concerto for Unified Europe, and he had a pregnant mistress. The completion of this concerto by Julie, left incomplete by her husband, marks the movie’s finish.
“BLUE” isn’t a lot a couple of tragedy or mourning however in regards to the quick aftermath of a horrific incident on a private degree. As Zizek factors out in “The Fright of Real Tears,” it’s exactly after the musical rating is accomplished, after she has slowly ‘returned’ to ‘real life,’ that she will be able to start the method of mourning.
8. Camera Buff (1979)
Released in 1979, “Camera Buff” is an autobiographical piece not within the sense that it sheds gentle on some private cases from Kieślowski’s life. Still, it’s the mythic story of the artist, each artist, who finds himself wholly seduced and on the mercy of this demanding, unrelenting muse, who needs nothing lower than the sacrifice of the entire being of the artist. Filip Mosz buys a digital camera to movie the primary recollections of his new child daughter so “she can watch herself grow.”
We see the pure awe and marvel on the existence of a digital camera and the way little and peculiar moments are captured, compressed, after which squirted into a bigger recreation. Then, there’s additionally the pure nervousness and self-consciousness that comes upon seeing a digital camera pointed at you. When Mosz movies two Party Nomenklatura as they arrive out of the assembly room to go to the washroom, they freeze of their steps once they see the digital camera. This is quickly adopted by the demand to delete that footage.
When Mosz buys the digital camera, everybody round him is blissful and curious, it with eyes filled with glee, curiosity, promise, and marvel. One can’t assist however ponder whether this was additionally the response in Moscow within the ‘20s when Dziga Vertov sat down on the streets with his camera. From the beginning, his wife is suspicious of this new toy that has come their way. She grows increasingly frustrated as she feels growingly neglected and alienated by her husband, especially when they’ve had a new child daughter.
Eventually, after his spouse leaves him, the distraught Mosz has just one factor left to do: flip his digital camera on himself, marking full absorption, finishing the circle, and turning his private tragedy right into a comedy, albeit a darkish one. This is a seminal work of cinema, Kieślowski’s third fictional characteristic movie, marking the transitional level in his profession when he switched in full gear from documentary to fiction filmmaking.
7. Three Colors: White (1994)
After being humiliated and divorced by his ex-wife for being impotent, stranded, homeless, and with out cash in France, Karol Karol illegally smuggles himself again residence to Poland in a hilarious sequence. The newly capitalized Poland is the proper place for a younger opportunist like Karol Karol, and thru a collection of elaborate schemes, he makes himself a affluent businessman. In a sick twist, nonetheless, Karol Karol makes a will, leaving all the things to his ex-wife, after which fakes his personal demise to lure her to come back to Poland. At his funeral, he watches her cry from afar. Later, when she comes residence, she finds Karol sitting in mattress. They lastly make passionate love.
In the morning, nonetheless, Karol Karol leaves earlier than she wakes up, and Dominique is arrested for the homicide of her ex-husband. The movie’s closing scene is Karol Karol going to jail to satisfy Dominique. He stops within the jail compound, appears to be like at her by means of the window, and begins crying. She says, “I love you,” in signal language.
“White” is about Equality. On a private aircraft, this movie explores the concept of equality in a romantic relationship. One can’t assist however ask, can there be real love amongst two people who find themselves not equals? Wouldn’t the extra highly effective in a relationship, inevitably, unintentionally even, find yourself utilizing the much less highly effective? Dominique says she doesn’t simply love Karol; she wants him. And so she desperately tries to impress him by humiliating him. Karol’s entire elaborate journey is to get again at Dominique, degree the rating, and get even. When Dominique finds that she has been performed and Karol efficiently will get his revenge, their twisted love for one another is rekindled.
6. A Short Film About Killing (1988)
This is a damning depiction, a cautionary story of pressing proportions, Kieślowski holding the mirror to society and exclaiming, “What are we doing!” a lot as how the younger lawyer does on the very finish. Waldemar, the cabbie, isn’t the kindest man round. He is imply to individuals for no cause. We see him feeding a canine, however later, he scares one other. He likes to maintain his automobile clear, which may generally assume obsessive ranges. He notably refuses a trip to some from the identical house complicated, out within the chilly, when he had no cause to.
Jacek is a typical teenager, aimlessly roaming about Warsaw’s miserable, gritty, inexperienced streets. He carries with him a miniature portrait of his child sister. The tales of Jacek and Waldemar, the cabbie, are intercut with a 3rd: Piotr Balicki, a younger, eloquent lawyer, being interviewed for the general public defender submit. The concepts of justice, mercy, and forgiveness begin right here, from the primary act itself, juxtaposed with the unreasonably unjust acts of each Jacek and Waldemar. All of this culminates within the famously lengthy homicide sequence. Aptly named “A Short Film About Killing” by juxtaposing two cold-blooded murders facet by facet, one by an impulsive teenager and one other by the secure, mature state equipment, this is without doubt one of the most damning indictments of capital punishment and maybe the longest ninety-minute movie one will ever see.
The movie’s uniquely bleak look and texture are solely owed to the cinematographer, Sławomir Idziak. Rarely has a European film made such use of damaging house and vignette in a medium-budget characteristic movie. It is daring and daring, and it pays off large time. Idziak would once more use his magical inexperienced contact three years later in “The Double Life of Veronique,” this time in Paris, and for a extra poetic impact.
Also learn Related to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Movies: Odes to the Silver Screen: 10 Cinematic Love Letters that Transcend Time
5. A Short Film About Love (1988)
Like the above, “A Short Film About Love” is the prolonged, feature-film model of “Dekalog 6.” Tomek is a younger boy who lives together with his grandmother and spies on his neighbor, Magda, a horny but a lot older lady. This begins as a typical stalker story. However, the film switches gears when Tomek confesses to spying on Magda, and shortly they’re in dialog. She will get extra interested by him as she learns extra about him. This naïve, inexperienced younger man claims to be in love along with her, whereas she, then again, a mature lady, has grown disillusioned with the concept of ‘love’ and doesn’t consider it exists. Magda takes Tomek residence and sexually humiliates him, urgent the purpose that there isn’t a love, solely lust. Tomek pushes her away, runs residence, and slashes his wrists.
“A Short Film About Love” differs solely from “Dekalog 6” in its ending. In the movie model, Magda sees that he has returned from the hospital and decides to satisfy him at his house. He is asleep, nonetheless, and his grandma asks her to not wake him. She sees his telescope, with which he peeps at her. She sees by means of it into her house, then closes her eyes tight shut, and sees herself on that evening when she got here residence, distraught, and spilled the bottle of milk. But this time, from behind comes Tomek, who warmly places his hand on her shoulder, thus finishing the circle.
This is a uniquely Kieślowski-an movie. Here, the voyeur turns into watched, and at one sensible second, each stalker and stalked are stalked by a 3rd particular person. Looking is a recurring theme all through Kieślowski’s movies. There is a powerful sense of somebody watching, watching intently. It’s a film about faces, gazes, delicate expressions, and eyes. Grażyna Szapołowska as Magda and Olaf Lubaszenko as Tomek delivers a uncommon synergy. This mysterious change goes on with out phrases, and we’re saved on the fringe of our seats, gasping. “A Short Film About Love” is probably probably the most tender movie Kieślowski has made.
4. The Double Life Of Veronique (1991)
The movie opens with a low-angled close-up of a lady singing at an out of doors live performance. We pan again to a large shot as she sings a chronic notice. This is Weronika, a Polish lady with a gifted voice. She has a lover, a father, and a sick aunt in Krakow. She tells her father, “I feel like I’m not alone in this universe.” Later, within the streets of Krakow, she sees somebody who appears to be like like her climb onto a bus. Her harmless smile is on her face, of child-like marvel and contentment. Her intense feeling is confirmed. Weronika auditions for a conductor in Krakow, and her husband, who directs operas, is immediately chosen. During the central efficiency, nonetheless, she mysteriously collapses and dies.
In France, Veronique, a music trainer, is overcome by a sudden wave of grief in the midst of passionate intercourse. From right here, we comply with her life, which has fascinating parallels and coincidences with the lifeless Weronika. She goes to her music tutor’s residence and tells him she gained’t proceed her coaching for any cause, simply an intuitive feeling. Veronique teaches her college students the music of Van den Budenmayer, the identical music the Polish Weronika carried out earlier than her demise. She tells her father she felt like she misplaced somebody on the identical day Weronika died.
What does it imply, although? What connections do the French and Polish Veronique share? Are they doppelgängers? Are they the identical particular person? How does one really feel about what has occurred to the opposite? There are not any solutions to those questions. It is merely a celebration of these freaky, deja-vu moments now we have all had sooner or later in our lives. Incidentally, that is additionally Kieślowski’s first manufacturing outdoors Poland. Is it not unreasonable, then, to see the story as a metaphor for Kieślowski’s frame of mind? Krzysztof Kieślowski did certainly die of a coronary heart downside in Poland, however we’re but to search out his French counterpart. Maybe on the morning of 14th March 1996, they felt the sturdy, inexplicable urge to give up filmmaking.
3. No End (1985)
“No End” is an intensely harrowing, heart-wrenching movie, a drama of the very best stature. This is the primary movie, the start of many future collaborations of Kieślowski with screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and music composer Zbigniew Preisner. Several themes that grow to be central within the later Kieslowski movies are seen of their infancy on this movie. Urszula is a just lately widowed spouse of a human rights lawyer whose pending circumstances come to hang-out her. Made in the midst of the height of political turmoil throughout martial legislation in Poland, this movie didn’t face a destiny like “Przypadek.” However, it was panned by the Party, the Church, and the Underground.
This film is rightly in comparison with Kieślowski’s later movie, “Blue.” “Blue” can be a couple of just lately widowed lady who grapples along with her bereavement. Like Julie is thrust to finish her husband’s concerto, Ursula in “No End” is compelled into her husband’s case. Like Julie, Ursula tries all the things to overlook and let loose from her previous. However, whereas Julie finishes the musical rating and therefore efficiently re-enters ‘normal life,’ the ache is an excessive amount of for Ursula to bear alone, and he or she turns inward and subsequently kills herself to reunite along with her husband. Unlike “Blue,” there are not any layers of irony in “No End.”
This is a straight, bleak tragedy expressing unfiltered, pure grief. It is nearly as if the miserable, dirty-green, communist, martial-law Poland was the proper surroundings for one to mourn somebody’s loss correctly. At the identical time, Paris’s free Western European panorama is simply too overwhelming for one to grieve appropriately. While “Blue” is a French story, “No End” is uniquely Polish. Hiding within the shadow of the behemoth “Dekalog,” it is a uncommon masterpiece of Polish cinema, a cornerstone of the important Kieślowski oeuvre.
2. Dekalog (1989)
What is lacking from most discourse on “Dekalog” is its place in Kieślowski’s oeuvre. The entire of “Dekalog” is at all times taken individually from the remainder of Kieślowski’s movies, just like how “Berlin Alexanderplatz” is taken independently from the remainder of the physique of labor of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one other nice European filmmaker, taken too quickly. Conceived scorching on the heels of the controversial reception of “No End,” the story is well-known: Piesiewicz, together with his unquenchable thirst for bother, proclaimed: “Someone should make a movie about the Ten Commandments” and the ever so keen filmmaker took it up as a problem questioning “how does one film the Commandments?”
Ten one-hour-long films of nice emotional depth and sensitivity can’t be compressed into this record. Each a part of Dekalog deserves its personal essay, and certainly, there isn’t a scarcity of scholarship for any episode. In his e-book, ‘I’m So So,’ Kieslowski calls “Dekalog” ‘stories of people who slowly realize that they are moving in circles,’ not not like the characters of “No End.” However, not like the characters of “No End,” the trials and tribulations are extra private and non secular.
As Slavoj Zizek accurately factors out, “Dekalog” must be admired for its saint-like resistance “to scoring easy points by spicing up the story with dissident thrills.” As “Camera Buff” marks Kieślowski’s transition from documentary to fiction, Dekalog marks his oeuvre shift from the political to the non secular. Conceived for tv, “Dekalog,” seen at residence on a giant display screen in solitude, makes for a non secular expertise, very like studying an incredible novel that transports you into one other world.
1. Three Colors: Red (1994)
“Red” is the final film Kieślowski made earlier than he introduced his retirement, the concluding a part of the “Three Colours Trilogy.” This was the film his physique of labor and his complete life led to. Valentine, a mannequin, on her means residence from work, runs over a canine, whose residence and proprietor she tracks with problem. It is an outdated man in a big home who couldn’t care much less about Irene or his personal injured canine. He is obsessed together with his unlawful pastime of spying on his neighbors. Valentine’s repulsive curiosity in regards to the outdated man progressively brings them to acquainted phrases, and we study he’s a retired decide.
Auguste is a younger lawyer getting ready to grow to be a decide. He is Valentine’s neighbor, and although it’s strongly hinted that the 2 will in some way meet or that their lives will intersect, it by no means occurs. He crosses the identical road Valentine drives by when certainly one of his textbooks falls, opening a related chapter within the legal code, which occurs to be the one which additionally comes within the examination. The parallels between the younger and outdated decide are too related for one to conclude they’re merely the youthful and older variations of the identical particular person. As Valentine crosses paths with Auguste all through the movie however by no means meets him, the outdated Judge, too, laments for by no means assembly ‘the one’ and even assembly Valentine forty years in the past.
If “No End” is the thematic companion to “Blue,” “Red” is the thematic companion to “Blind Chance.” The central theme explored in “Blind Chance” is the blind hand of probability, randomness. A mere distinction of a second would result in a sequence of occasions wholly against how they unfolded. Real life poses an infinite stream of ‘what ifs’. In “Blind Chance,” Kieślowski instantly performs god by blocking the narrative midway and beginning over, but the protagonist finally ends up with the identical destiny in all three eventualities. For all its random, blind probability, a dreadful sense of fatalism looms all through ”Blind Chance.”
“Red” isn’t a Polish story however, once more, a French one. It is filled with characters who cross every others’ paths however by no means meet, leaving us to marvel, “What if they did?” While in “Blind Chance,” most characters cross every others’ lives in a single model or one other, in “Red,” they’re intentionally saved aside. While the Kieslowski of “Blind Chance” made the aircraft explode, the Kieslowski of twelve years later gave the individuals on the cruise a second probability. “Red” can therefore even be referred to as the anti-Kieślowski movie. No fatalistic hand sways the narrative right here, nor are there any double lives. Here, life merely performs out because it does, and we’re invited to invest until we pull our hair out.
Read More: Conflicting Resolutions and the Metaphor of the Aged People in Kieślowski’s Three Colors Trilogy