The Essentials: Krzysztof Kieslowski

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

It’s perhaps comical to describe a filmmaker revered in some circles as underrated when they’ve been nominated for some of the biggest prizes in cinema — the Palme d’Or, Venice’s Golden Lion, the Academy Awards, Berlin’s Golden Bear. But perhaps because Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski never really took many of these major prizes home, and never gained global status until later in his career, we find that the filmmaker is not as revered as we’d like (though he tied for a Golden Lion in 1993). Perhaps this observation is very relative. Perhaps it’s because he didn’t enter the Criterion canon until 2006, perhaps because his career ended too abruptly just as it was truly ascending, or perhaps simply because he’s one of our most adored filmmakers: we routinely never give up an opportunity to celebrate Kieslowski’s work when we can.

A Polish director who spent much of his life behind the country’s postwar communist regime (and felt the pains of its control and censorship), Kieslowski started out as a documentarian and then made his first feature-length drama in 1975. While the early narrative films contained many elements of social realism and political dimension within the intangible and mystical conceits Kieslowski is known for, the filmmaker’s work soon discarded many of his overly political ideas and shifted into his unwavering purpose: exploring the metaphysical, random mysteries and paradoxes of the universe via themes of chance, interconnectivity, identity, destiny and more. The films had some high-concepts on paper — movies about doppelgangers, rewriting one’s time and history, second chances, reaching beyond parallel alternative universes and even death — but each one had a spiritual resonance, an emotional weight, a soulful humanism, and a dramatic texture that made them beautifully profound and enigmatically enrapturing.

Stanley Kubrick himself once said of Kieslowski and his constant screenwriting companion Krzysztof Piesiewicz — a lawyer and now a prominent politician — “I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work… They [dramatize life] with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.”

There’s arguably a before and after period in Kieslowski’s work that is divided by 1985’s “No End.” That film marked the first collaboration with screenwriter Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner and both men would work on every subsequent Kieslowski picture. Arguably, Kieslowski’s metaphysical sonnets of intuitive nature from that period forward became masterful symphonies of sound, color, and rich emotional transcendence. Interestingly enough, this new period would center almost exclusively on ravishing female protagonists (though “The Dekalog” was mixed).

Frustrated by the medium of cinema and/or his own limitations — a terminally cynical Kieslowski didn’t believe the interior mysteriousness of the human condition could be aptly captured on film, though that hardly ever stopped him — and exhausted by the speed in which he made his final masterwork and triptych Three Colors trilogy (he directed all three in under ten months and at one point he was editing, shooting and writing all three films simultaneously), Kieslowski announced his retirement at the age of 52 during the premiere of “Red” at the Cannes Film Festival. Just under two years later, as word came out that he was considering leaving retirement to form a new trilogy loosely based on the concepts of heaven, hell and purgatory (one of which was later directed by Tom Tykwer), the filmmaker died during open-heart surgery at the all-too early age of 54. Krzysztof Kieslowski passed away 17 years ago today, and so simply we use this opportunity to celebrate the filmmaker who believed that strangers were perhaps not so estranged; who sometimes believed the our existence was a cruel trick with deeper meaning we couldn’t fully comprehend; who believed in contemplating the mysterious elements of the universe that unified us as people beyond nationalities, race religions, political and personal philosophies.

“The Dekalog” (1988)
While “The Double Life Of Veronique” was his first international breakthrough and the Three Colors trilogy brought him much more acclaim, Kieslowski’s first masterpiece was “The Dekalog,” a ten part cycle of short films shot for Polish television. Co-written with Piesiewicz, the two men conceived of ten vignettes that would be loosely based on the Ten Commandments and one hour long each. Set in a bleak and drab housing project in Warsaw, “The Dekalog” illustrated ten stories of moral and ethical dilemmas that various loosely intertwined characters faced. Moody and melancholic throughout, perhaps one of the most powerful, resonating and moving shorts is episode I, based on “Thou shalt have no other gods.” It centers on a university professor who teaches his son the virtues of the scientific methodology and philosophy above all others, but fate intervenes tragically. The only recurring character throughout the series is a silent, nameless figure, a perhaps celestial and Christ-like figure who is shown observing the character in each moral tale. “The Dekalog” made huge fans of Stanley Kubrick and Roger Ebert (who I still have to thank for bringing these films to my attention on TV in the late ‘80s) and the international film community (while he had been in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes previously; one of the extended shorts would be the first time he was invited into main competition). Due to contractual obligations, Kieslowski expanded parts V and VII into longer feature-length films, “A Short Film About Killing” and “A Short Film About Love,” the former taking the Jury and FIPRESCI prizes at Cannes that year. While the religious and metaphysical connotations are obviously present, “The Dekalog” is also an examination (and sometimes censure) on the mental condition of Polish society during the communist regime hence harsh gray conditions and the unbearable opaqueness of being that floats over the films like a somber cloud. If there is one major crime of home video it is that “The Dekalog” is still collecting dust on shelves in an outdated, bare-bones version that hopefully will be rectified by someone like the Criterion Collection soon.