Seeing red--& blue & white.

The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski 

The Liminal Image

Joseph G. Kickasola

Continuum, $19.95, 332 pp.

There is a scene in Blue, the first movie in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's much-praised Three Colors Trilogy, that has remained with me for a long time. Julie, the character played by Juliette Binoche, is leaving her home in the French countryside. She was recently in a car accident that killed her husband and daughter, though she has not done much grieving. As she leaves the property, she drags her knuckles along a stone wall. The camera does not linger long on her hand, but the image tells us much about the pain she is experiencing.

There are many such moments in Blue--scenes in which the briefest of gestures or close-ups capture a mood or advance the narrative. Blue was one of the last films made by Kieslowski, who died in 1996. By then he had refined his style to the point where he could compress large amounts of suggestive detail, both with regard to psychology and plot, into the briefest of scenes. Kieslowski once said, "I make movies just so that I can edit them," and nowhere are his editing skills more apparent than in Blue. Some of the images are so brief, and their meaning so subtle, that they become clear only on a second or third viewing. (I needed the help of the film's DVD commentary, for example, to catch a close-up of oil dripping from a car that crashes a few scenes later.) Such extreme compression is one of the reasons Kieslowski has been called an oblique and enigmatic director. I don't think this assessment is quite correct. To me, Kieslowski's films are like sophisticated pieces of music: they may seem dense and inaccessible at first, but they accumulate considerable power, the more familiar you become with them.

Kieslowski was born in Warsaw and trained at the prestigious Lodz Film School, where he had access to American and European films otherwise unavailable in Communist Poland. La Strada, Citizen Kane, and The 400 Blows were among his favorite movies. Like many Polish directors at the time, Kieslowski began by making documentaries. "There was a necessity, a need ... to describe the world," Kieslowski later said. "The Communist world had described how it should be and not how it really was."

Eventually Kieslowski began writing his own scripts. One of his most interesting early films was Blind Chance, made in 1981 and immediately banned. Blind Chance deals with two subjects Kieslowski would come to be identified with: religion and politics. The story is told three different ways, based on what happens when Witek, a young medical student, runs to catch a train. In one scenario he winds up joining the Communist Party. In another, he joins the resistance and rediscovers his faith after meeting with a pious woman who quotes Mother Teresa.

Blind Chance was presumably banned because of its sympathetic portrayal of the resistance movement, yet it would be a mistake to categorize it as a political film in the way that, say, The Crucible was a political play. Kieslowski didn't like to discuss politics and was skeptical of the political process. In Blind Chance, and later in the television series The Decalogue, he used Communist Poland the same way Tolstoy used the Napoleonic era; the charged atmosphere of the time provided an ideal backdrop for the exploration of serious moral issues.

Kieslowski was born into a Catholic family, though later in life he often proclaimed his distaste for organized religion. Still, he was intrigued by the idea of God, and his films examined theological concepts like predestination and free will (Blind Chance is a prime example). He was also fascinated by coincidence and what Joseph Kickasola, in his plodding The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, calls the "interconnectedness of human beings." For most of his life, Kieslowski remained a believer of sorts, "a hopeful agnostic," according to Kickasola. "The world is not only bright lights, this hectic pace, the Coca-Cola with a straw, the new car," Kieslowski once told an interviewer. "Another truth exists ... a hereafter? Yes, surely. Good or bad, I don't know, but ... something else."

What was most refreshing about Kieslowski was that he took faith seriously. When he used a Catholic image--such as the weeping Mary in Decalogue I, seen after the tragic death of a child--he does so for a reason, not simply because he's drawn to Catholic imagery. (Kickasola argues that the scene represents "divine grief" for all those "affected by the Fall.") This is what distinguishes Kieslowski from Pedro Almodovar or any number of other Catholic directors working today. Kieslowski left the church, but through his films he confronted questions that all Catholics--all believers--must face. Does God exist? What does it mean to believe? What are our responsibilities to others?

The Decalogue deals with these questions directly. Produced in 1988 for Polish television, The Decalogue was first released in theaters in the United States in 2000. (Joseph Cunneen offered an excellent analysis of the series in these pages on August 14, 1997.) In these films Kieslowski and his screenwriter, Krzyszt of Piesiewicz, were able to dramatize the moral and existential challenges posed by the Commandments in completely fresh, sometimes shocking ways. In Decalogue IV, for instance, a teenage girl flirts with her foster father when she learns that he is not her biological kin. Like the English novelist Ian McEwan, Kieslowski took slightly disreputable scenarios and made them strangely compelling.

The films that made up the Three Colors Trilogy were the last films Kieslowski made before his unexpected death at the age of fifty-four. Inspired by the French values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, these films are among his most experimental. Kieslowski pushed the bounds of the medium, playing with abstract images and making subtle references to his earlier films. Red, for example, features several images of Valentine, the main character, that include her reflection--a sly nod to his earlier film The Double Life of Veronique, in which the same actress (Irene Jacob) plays two characters who do not know one another but are vaguely aware of one another's existence. Watching these films can be a rich experience for Kieslowski fans, but first-time viewers are often baffled by them.

Kieslowski's use of abstract images is the subject of Joseph Kickasola's book. Abstract images create a "metaphysical aura," Kickasola writes, which in turn imbues Kieslowski's films with a "consistent sense of wonder and spiritual suggestion." Explaining how Kieslowski achieved such an effect is not an easy thing to do, though, and too often Kickasola resorts to labored film-school analysis. (An abstract image of Julie's eye, following her car accident, is said to represent her spiritual struggle "to see.") Kieslowski's films do indeed convey a sense of the "transcendent," but deconstructing them in this way seems like a futile exercise. Better just to sit back and absorb an experience that is as much visceral as it is cerebral.

Maurice Timothy Reidy is an associate editor of Commonweal.