POLISH FILM ACADEMY

Świat według Kieślowskiego/The World According to Kieślowski, Editor: Barbara Kurowska, Publisher: Muzeum Kinematografii w Łodzi, 2011

Krzysztof Kieślowski: Je t’aime… Moi non plus

Grażyna Arata

The famous sentence ‘I love you... me neither’ from a Serge Gainsbourg song might serve as an introduction to, and illustration of, the bizarre relation which linked the adoptive homeland of the French composer and singer, son of Jewish Russian immigrants, with the Polish film director. Like in a truly beautiful and tragic passion, it all started with a wonderful discovery and infatuation, followed by fascination, which ended, on the French part, when a new object of love appeared. We know, however, that the song does not lie and a great love never really dies. In one’s heart and in one’s memory there is always a flickering flame which can flare up more strongly than before.

A fascinating discovery

The Cannes Festival, 1988. The audience and journalists are in a state of shock. On the screen a man is murdering a taxi driver. The picture exudes realism, brutality, the never-ending struggle for survival. The murder is not shown just to be sensational. The artist seems to be saying, ‘This is what the ruthless horror of our actions is really like.’ A Short Film About Killing fascinates with documentary truth. A cinematographic bomb explodes in Cannes.

The Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize confirm the birth of a new star endorsed by journalists and critics. ‘This was an electric shock... an absolute cinema experience comparable to Un Chien Andalou.’ France discovers a 47-year-old author of 23 documentaries and shorts, 4 television films and 4 feature fiction films, already hailed at the Rotterdam festival as ‘one of the most important film directors in history’.

The Canon France company (from 1993 part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is looking for a way to improve its reputation as a film authority. On the advice of the producer Leonardo da Fuente, they organize a session featuring four films by Kieślowski: the already vaunted e Short Film About Killing, Camera Buff, Blind Chance and No End. The French critics are definitely enthusiastic. It is not certain yet how the ‘Polish phenomenon’ will be received by a wider audience.

The audience will fall in love with Krzysztof Kieślowski and his difficult, sad reflections in the television series Decalogue, as a long-awaited revelation. No film expert, sociologist or philosopher has been able so far to explain this passion of the French audience for the strict Polish moralist, whose stories are set in a reality dozens of years away – historically, mentally, environmentally – from the ‘French lightness of being’.

In 1989 the film distributor Claude-Eric Poiroux screens the cinema version of A Short Film About Love in eight art houses in Paris. Unexpectedly, it is not only the critics who hurry out to meet Kieślowski, but also the ‘man in the street’, and in numbers, too: 80,000 in Paris and 200,000 in the whole of France. This is a sign of true interest, a fusion of Kieślowski’s sensitivity and the subconscious expectations of the French audience. A few months later a battle takes place in Warsaw between distributors interested in showing The Decalogue in France – Poiroux wins after investing 450,000 dollars and with support from the cultural TV network, La Sept (today: Arte). The series is shown on television in February, and in cinemas in March 1990. Despite some technical difficulties with the presentation, The Decalogue attracts 130,000 viewers in Paris and 300,000 in whole France. Kieślowski suddenly becomes interesting ‘commercially’. Chloé Larouchi writes in Criticat, ‘Kieślowski is primarily a documentarian-vivisectionist. With his scalpel he opens up the stomach of Poland and does not spare the viewer the rot and filth of the digestive process. His talent lies in the microscopic observation of a biologist who overlooks no single detail of reality: the dark stream of water from the tap, the battered bathtub, the overflowing dustbins. In this sombre atmosphere of sadness and
greyness man is a wolf to his fellow man, and consequently, to himself.’ Cécile Mury in Telerama sees Kieślowski as a philosopher who ‘films human souls and ponders on human fate being a bizarre mixture of chance, determination and freedom.’

Infatuation

The success of Kieślowski’s films both at the festival and at the box office attracts the attention of French producers. Léonardo da Fuente, already involved financially in the distribution of The Decalogue invites Kieślowski to make a film ‘in French conditions’, with an ample budget and technical facilitations. The result is The Double Life of Véronique (1991). The picture is instantly showered with prizes, including the Best Actress Award at Cannes. It surprises with its dissimilarity – the precision and ruthless objectivity of a documentary are replaced by an observation of the heroine’s love life, a gentle colour scheme, intuitions and pensive moods. It is no coincidence that the French part of the film is set in Clermont-Ferrand, a ‘grey’ city embodying ‘little Poland’ for the French.

The critics see it as another step towards the existential mystery. ‘The critical reflection on life is also a critical reflection on narrative form: Buñuel tried to cast two actresses in one role (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977), Kieślowski tries to put one into two characters. And like Buñuel, he leaves no key to the enigma. Compared with The Decalogue, we are one more step closer to the curtain of mystery (Alain Masson, Positif).’

Michel Ciment in a Positif interview with Kieślowski detects elements of fantasy: ‘Some most rational artists like Stanley Kubrick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz or Fritz Lang turned toward fantasy. You seem to be taking the same direction? How can you explain that?’

‘I’m trying to get as close to the character as possible’, says Kieślowski. ‘The closer I get, the more I enter the sphere of mystery, phantasms, imaginings, the metaphysical. This is what we all carry inside’. Ciment will not accept this for an answer: ‘It’s not only our inner life, it’s irrational. Everybody is different in this world, and only in your film does one find what in fact does not exist – absolute similarity. Such an assumption is fantastic, irrational, and you are a very rational person’. In France – the country of Cartesian rationalism – the fascination with the Slavic documentary film director who has stepped in a masterly fashion into the world of ‘premonitions and unbridled spirituality’ reaches its height when Kieślowski reveals his idea of releasing various versions of The Double Life... ‘I found this film very difficult to edit. I made 23 versions because the topic is very difficult, very delicate. I also had this interesting notion of preparing as many versions as there were screening rooms in Paris. Each would have had its own number and the plot would have been slightly altered. We’d been thinking of 15 versions but I ran out of time’. This unique idea will certainly pass into legend in France.

The success of The Double Life... opens the door to Three Colours: Blue - White - Red, a result of close collaboration with Marin Karmitz, producer and distributor. The inspiration for this trilogy exalting the French republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity came from Krzysztof Piesiewicz. In The Decalogue Kieślowski based his analysis of life in Communist Poland on a religious message; now he wants to look at life through the prism of the rationalist ideals inscribed in the French constitution. Paradoxically, the Polish documentary stories are based on dogmas of faith, while the French stories illustrating the idealized ‘commandments of reason’ resemble philosophical, maybe biblical, parables.

The critics notice other paradoxes as well. ‘Kieślowski juggles with the logic of numbers but often invokes chance’, remarks Gérard Lefort in Libération. Those ten, three or four-digit combinations (screenplays written four handed), invented as if only to create a shield against life’s chaos, do not really paralyse it; quite the opposite – they feed it, motivate it, encourage it to show. But the real courtesy of Kieślowski’s film world is the freedom that the viewer is given, the freedom of interpretation, bizarre associations and surprising interferences’. The journalist recalls the master’s words: ‘Instead of explanations I bring you mysteries.’

In 1993 Blue (Freedom) is screened in France with Juliette Binoche as Julie. Agnès Peck from Positif and other critics enthuse. ‘Blue is a work of absolute value in which different levels of emotions, impressions and intellectual analysis are brilliantly combined. To start with, it is a very sensual film. Quite banal sounds, individualized and employed in a surprising way, become a very effective means of emotional communication with the audience. Similarly, in the visual sphere, the introduction of macro photography and the magnification of detail are, as with David Lynch, a way to make the picture unreal and to take the viewer inside existence. Blue suggests depth, an ocean, a rebirth of the main character after the range of her sensitivity is extended. Blue is also the colour of music, the most dematerialized kind of art. Few film directors manage to translate abstract philosophical thought
or intuition into the language of the visual with such precision. The enigmatic telepathy of emotions, already visible in The Double Life... and interpretable as divine grace, artistic sensitivity or a gift of love, is present in the splendid female characters who, like Irène Jacob or Juliette Binoche, are the best medium between the director’s spirit and the audience.’

So what does Kieślowski’s spirit in fact convey in Blue? ‘The emphasized message is love, the underlying message is freedom, in fact never to be attained,’ suggests Michel Ciment in an interview with Kieślowski, and the artist agrees. ‘Exactly. Love is always in a sort of opposition to freedom. By loving someone we become dependent on them. This is the topic of the film.’ Blue won the Golden Lion at Venice and had 1.3 million viewers in France.

In Blue music is the foreground element of the dramatic structure. The heroine is kind of reborn for music and through music. It is worth noting that music by Zbigniew Preisner had already played an important role in The Double Life of Véronique. The DVD soundtrack was a real hit with dozens of thousands of copies sold. After Blue comes White and it surprises the French critics and viewers with its rather sensational plot. The return to a male character (played by Zbigniew Zamachowski) who plots an involved, cunning, Polishtype scheme to take revenge on his ex-wife (Julie Delpy) confuses
the audience, which is reflected by a low turnout (only 500,000; the lowest of the trilogy). Thierry Jousse in 'Cahiers du cinéma' describes White as a non-colour on which a whole palette of colour impressions can be recorded. To start with, white – the colour of a white wedding and mariage blanc too. Then black – like the black market and the black contract between the two main characters. The ‘equality’ implied by the title is mainly nihilistic; each of the men dominates the other in his own country and social environment. When in a TV interview Michel Field stressed – as befitted a French philosopher – the beauty of the doctrine of equality, Kieślowski tempered his optimism saying, ‘of course, equality is an absolute utopia. No-one wants to be equal. Everyone wants to be better than others.’

In 1994 Red (Fraternity) is released, the last in the trilogy with the superb duet of Irène Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The critics and Kieślowski’s fans agree that it is the best film in the cycle. It combines aesthetic refinement with a suspense screenplay and characters who seem to be undergoing a parallel emotional evolution. A young warmhearted girl revives the shrivelled heart of a judge who ‘has stopped believing people and in people’. He himself, for his part, prepares her to meet ‘a real love’. Opinions on the film in blogs are still enthusiastic after years: ‘Kieślowski is not a film director; he is a poet of the visual’. ‘Kieślowski has shown me the sense of films, for which I am most
grateful to him.’ ‘A lesson from Kieślowski’s film may be drawn from observation of the contrast between the common high-flown chatter about fraternity and actual isolation from the problems of others’. Another fan quotes Kieślowski: ‘Fraternity exists when you are ready
to listen to another person’.

The film drew 875,000 viewers in France, received six César nominations and with critics’ awards and Oscar nominations became a phenomenon on the other side of the Atlantic. In total, the trilogy was shown in 70 countries, attracting almost eight million viewers.

‘I love you... me neither’

The infatuation with Kieślowski was hard to explain rationally and as such seemed suspicious, if not manipulated, to some journalists. Especially sceptical and reserved was 'Cahiers du cinéma', a French film magazine for which the popular success of a film automatically invalidated any artistic claims on its part. Antoine de Baeque regularly warned against the overuse of the word ‘genius’: ‘Tarkovsky and Kieslowski are just surrogate values. This is just an escape into churches, East European exoticism. It is hard to understand why Kieślowski, an inept film director focusing on the mediocrity of human existence debilitated by blind chance, blind alleys and unfathomable mysteries, is being hailed by our cultural press – from Telerama to Le Monde – as a genius...’

Vincent Ostria says of Blue, ‘Kieślowski presents French reality in isolation from any documentary truth and manipulates characters and the screenplay, balancing on the border between kitsch and low-class
entertainment. (...) The heroine achieves the titular freedom in a very ruthless way (Kieślowski is indeed a ruthless director) – through the death of her husband and her little daughter (...) And most irritating is the director’s and his producer’s will to make European films with no geographic identity, as if to the European Union’s order. Why can Kieślowski not follow Skolimowski and make a film about his less privileged compatriots, who leave their homeland in the hope of a consumerist bliss and end up on benches for the homeless?’ Frédéric Straub writes about Red: ‘The screenplay toys with chance..., but Kieślowski does not tolerate chance. He controls the whole by controlling shots, often very beautiful ones. Unfortunately, they are like a beautiful picture surrounding an empty space. Chance has been eliminated in the pursuit of total control.’

‘I feel good in Paris,’ claimed Kieślowski. ‘Although I don’t speak French, I don’t feel like a foreigner. But of course I don’t know thousands of details and I count on help from the actors’. His collaborators recalled cinema buffs who recognized him in the street and thanked him for his films. France loved him. In Paris, one could always come across ardent ‘believers’ of Kieślowski at small dinner parties, improvised meetings or university lectures. Still, venomous criticism can be particularly painful for sensitive artists – Kieślowski did complain at times about the ‘malice of some journalists’.

The huge success, terrible fatigue and perhaps the foreboding recorded in The Double Life of Véronique led him to back out of the ‘arena’. With his untimely death, Kieślowski orphaned his fans and the cinema world. Le Figaro wrote, ‘Europe has lost one of its most valuable film directors – one who loved cinema the least, who did not want to be regarded as an artist, philosopher or moralist. Even less as a focus of media attention. An anti-director of a kind. A piercing look, black humour, sharp wit, laconic reply – Krzysztof Kieślowski would not tolerate easy explanations, hasty interpretations, unnecessary comments. (...) His films will remain as important works in the history of cinema for their rigorous and honest observation, but also for the subtle and rich analysis of contemplated reality.’

Krzysztof Kieślowski lives on in his films and in the hearts of his fans. After his death, his pictures seemed to have ‘fallen silent’. They were shown mostly during retrospectives at subsequent anniversaries and cinema screenings gave way to successive DVD editions. The message of the Polish film director and his art are analysed now on film studiem courses. New masters and doctoral dissertations are written. Young people keep rediscovering Kieślowski.

One of the most faithful followers of the artist and someone who would not succumb to media oblivion is Alain Martin, who has published two books on Kieślowski, runs a thematic blog and is a guardian of his memory. ‘Why Kieślowski? Because he can, provided one has the right kind of sensitivity, change our view of life. I, too, have been touched by his magic wand. In the question that he poses I can see
my own hesitations, breakdowns, right and wrong decisions. This is why I love his cinema: confronted with my own fate I see myself as a bit more intelligent!

I was also lucky that my path crossed the paths of actors and technicians who had worked with Krzysztof Kieślowski and talked about him (often in the present tense) as someone UNIQUE. That is why I decided to share those conversations, meet other collaborators and perhaps write another book.’

Kieślowski ‘always alive’?
In France most certainly yes!

Wróć do poprzedniej strony