dekalog, five (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Of course I watched this thinking I had seen it before. I hadn’t. I’d seen a Short Film About Killing. This is the shorter version, the sketch, if you like. But this shouldn’t in any way detract. The shorter version is astonishing. Perhaps more so than the longer. Kieslowski employs a sparse dialogue. Images are distorted. A vignette blurs the edges of the frame. For a while we have no idea who is the protagonist. The stressed out lawyer or the unpleasant taxi driver or the youth. Then we realise it’s the youth. The killer, who will be killed. The narrative is already chopped in three, and then, as the pieces come together, the whole thing coalesces into a terrible, mortal whole. The ultimate effect, compressed into 55 minutes, is devastating, Needless death begets needless death. You can see why the director chose this tale to expand. But you can also see why it wasn’t entirely necessary. 

dekalog, four (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the fourth chapter of Kieslowski’s Dekalog is the lack of astonishing things. There are no big dramatic moments. There’s one long dramatic scene, which culminates in a decision (or two decisions), but no-one fights, no-one fucks, no-one even screams. All those things which are taken for granted as being necessary to make captivating drama are missing. In spite of this, the short film has you sitting on the edge of your seat. There a tension which is almost nebulous, but instilled in every frame. The shadow of incest, which might have become the focus, is dispelled. This is a simple tale about the meaning of love, rendered with minimal effort. 

three colours white (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I went to watch 3 Colours White as something of a corrective to Blue, which blew me away. It feels as though the same, perhaps, was the case for the director, the second film in his trilogy acting as a counterpoint to the first. The tone is abruptly different, both more light-hearted, and more cynical. It’s an unhappy love story, telling the story of Polish hairdresser Karol’s quest for revenge, after being abandoned by Dominique, his French wife. The narrative is far simpler than Blue, with a clearer trajectory for the protagonist, who has to find a way to lure Dominique to Poland in order to achieve his objective. There is clearly a strong commentary about the ethics of a new capitalist Poland at play, as Karol both embraces capitalism, in a sequence which is almost comically slapdash, going from down-and-out hairdresser to wealthy entrepreneur in the space of fifteen screen minutes, but also embraces the cold-bloodedness of capitalism, setting Dominique up for her fall with a clear-headedness which is unexpectedly ruthless.

three colours blue (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I don’t know how many times I have seen this film, and it’s worth noting that the print was very poor quality, but last night it connected with me in that way that happens when a work of art feels so direct that it’s as though it is speaking to you personally.

The film was moving (emocionante - Spanish has a word which better captures the sensation), both emotionally and intellectually. As regular readers will know, this is not something that happens all that often. In part because of my incipient Englishness, which makes me wary of triggered emotional reactions, in part because my instincts are probably on the whole intellectual rather than emotional (if that division has any kind of validity). I am also wary of what might be called ‘Great Artist Syndrome’, which is the disease which means people go weak at the knees when in the presence of a supposedly great artist, losing all critical faculties.

So I have tried to analyse why this particular film, which tells the story of a young woman’s recovery from the tragedy of losing her child and her husband in a car crash, was so affecting.

Juliet Binoche in a Portobello Cafe

Given the premise, opening the film from an emotionally charged standpoint as we witness the actual crash, the director was steering the viewer into highly emotive territory. Binoche’s performance is, thereafter, the triumph of reason over emotion. Where we are guided to react to moments of emotional distress with our own outpouring of matching distress, Binoche’s character, Julie, (her name so similar to the protagonist’s) reacts with unfettered intellectual rigour. There’s an early scene where the old housekeeper weeps, saying she is weeping the tears that Julie will not. In classical narrative terms, the script would be steering the character towards a moment of catharsis, when the emotion would finally be expunged and Julie would weep those tears which she refuses to or cannot at the start. This doesn’t happen. Kieslowski/ Binoche/ the Script never offer the character this cathartic moment. The more the script held off from permitting the character this moment, the more emotionally charged the film became. I remember once spotting Binoche in a Portobello Cafe, looking utterly and completely herself. This might sound like a stupid thing to say, but I think it reflects the way she as an actress succeeds in fusing outer and inner appearance on screen: we never for a moment question a performance which is a sublime example of screen acting, in spite of the fact she the script refuses to let her do what we expect or anticipate a dramatic character to do in this situation. She at once defies us and convinces us, a balancing act that never wavers

The Act of Killing the Act of Kindness

The director Joshua Oppenheimer made a very powerful film called The Act of Killing, which is a slightly leftfield way of introducing the idea that Blue could have been retitled An Act of Kindness. In modern narrative models, the protagonist is supposed to be decisive, to take action. So often, the action of action leads towards violence, even cruelty. This is because violent acts are considered dramatically more engaging, from Homer and Beowulf until the present day. Julie is a character who is hiding. She is in retreat from the world. When asked by an estate agent she’s going to rent a flat from what she does, she says “Nothing”. Instead of going out and fighting against fate and anyone who backs fate up, she retreats. Hiding, in our world. is usually associated with cowardliness. (In others it is associated with saintliness.) But we never feel Julie is a coward, in part because of the ferocious strength Binoche’s performance manifests. Instead, she is someone who is resisting conventional models of grief. This culminates in an action which is one of both forgiveness and inordinate kindness. In dramatic terms it is a small action, one which requires no physical exertion, one which doesn’t demonstrably alter her own well-being. It is at once the most innocuous of dramatic twists and the most radical and it is in its small way reflective of a director who appears to be turning his back on thousands of years of narrative (and social) conformity.

The Lost Dream of Europe

Julie’s husband is a composer who has a commission to write a symphony to celebrate European Unification. He dies with the symphony unfinished. Julie and her lover, Olivier, eventually complete it. If there is anything that signifies Julie’s final recuperation from the tragedy it is that she comes to accept the legacy of her husband’s music (which she collaborated in the writing of) and agrees to help in the completion of the score. There is in this narrative angle an intimation that Julie’s process of healing runs parallel to a European process of healing, which for Kieslowski and his generation goes back to the wars of the twentieth century and subsequent ideological conflict. The progressive, pacifist element of the European project is celebrated in Julie and her husband and her lover’s shared project, and the film’s music itself. It goes without saying that there is, from an English-British perspective, something heartbreaking about witnessing this, (from our point of view), lost dream of European Union. It only serves to consolidate the known fact that what has happened to our nation has been a triumph of the philistines, and those bellicose instincts which Kieslowski’s film so roundly and subtly subverts.

The Bravery of a director who Empowers Sound above Image

Finally, in a note that is connected to the above, there is the issue of the music itself and the way the director prioritises it within his structural use of the elements at his disposal as a filmmaker. The music is employed in an entirely intrusive manner. It rears up at moments, out of context, like another character stamping on stage. Kieslowski worked with Zbigniew Preisner, the composer, on numerous occasions. He clearly had complete faith in Preisner to construct a music which would not only possess a dramatic potency which would counterpoint Julie’s passivity, but would also be, in so many ways, the star of the show. Music has a transcendent power which the word and its cinematic sister, the image, can never quite match. It communicates with the listener in a visceral manner, uncluttered by the noise of ideas and the rationality. The use of music is where Kieslowski front ends the emotional charge of his film, in so doing defying the audience, like his protagonist, to resist its power. And we cannot. The music overwhelms us. 

a short film about love (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

 Kieslowski became the celebrated European auteur towards the end of his short life. He died at the age of 54. His final Three Colours Trilogy is what he is most celebrated for now, but he had already had a prolific career before he “burst onto the scene”, as they say. A Short Film About Love is an extended version of one of his Dekalog series, where he made ten films set on a Warsaw housing estate. These ten films were originally an hour long, and two of them, ‘Love’ and ‘Killing’, were then given feature length versions. Wikipedia notes that all twelve were made in the same year, but when there was a plan to do the same for ‘Jealousy’, “exhaustion eventually prevented him from making what would have been his thirteenth film in less than a year."

There is something disarmingly simple about Kieślowski’s storytelling. He does not appear to make films about great themes, although there are themes that run through his films. Instead he creates fables about people, locating the universal in the individual. These days, in an atomised capitalist world, it is very hard to get a film financed unless it has a marketable theme and ‘target audience’. The target audience for A Short Film about Love, which clearly riffs to an extent off Rear Window, can only be described as frustrated post-adolescent lovers and confused adults, which is quite a broad audience base. The film tells the tale of a young man, Tomek, who spies on a woman who lives in the opposite block, and, believing himself to be in love, engineers a way of letting her know. The woman, Magda, understandably finds it hard to take Tomek seriously, but then finds herself surprised to discover how his infatuation affects and changes her.

Watching the film, one is struck by the way in which Kieślowski’s better known masterpieces were a product of the freedom he had enjoyed to learn his trade, that trade being to both be a filmmaker and also a poet of the human consciousness. His focus is on the way our weaknesses can become our strengths, and vice versa. How courage so often manifests itself, for the common person, in the most unlikely, even cowardly fashion. How heroism and anti-heroism in the real world are rarely what they might claim to be in the movies. Cinema needs more Kieślowskis, more poets of the every day, artists capable of transforming the banal into the transcendent. 

nb It is worth noting the remarkable quality of Kieślowski’s actors, who lend their humanity to these complex characters. It’s gratifying to note that both Olaf Lubaszenko (Tomek) and Grazyna Szapolowska (Magda) are still working, according to IMDB. The beautiful secondary performance of Stefania Iwinska as the godmother should also be celebrated. 

camera buff (w&d krzysztof kieslowski)

Camera Buff  is one of Kieslowski’s earliest features. A cursory glance at IMDB however reveals that he had more than a decade of experience making documentaries by the time he came to make Camera Buff. Given this, it would seem there is more than a slight element of autobiography to the film, which narrates the story of Filip, a seemingly innocuous husband and worker with a young son who is given a camera which changes his life. Filip is commissioned by the factory boss to make a short documentary about an anniversary celebration, a documentary which ends up winning third prize in a festival and launching him on an erratic and perilous career as a filmmaker. Filip becomes increasingly obsessed by the camera’s perspective, seeing the world through its viewfinder, something that leads to him becoming distanced from his wife, as well as compelling him to capture aspects of the world which the state would rather weren’t acknowledged. It’s a film about film, with plenty of wry humour (“Why did you include a shot of a pigeon in the documentary?”) and a slightly acerbic take on the industry. It’s also a great portrayal of the extent of freedom in communist Poland.