Krzysztof Kieślowski

Krzysztof Kieślowski
Born June 27, 1941(1941-06-27)
Warsaw, General Government, Third Reich
Died March 13, 1996(1996-03-13) (aged 54)
Warsaw, Poland
Spouse Maria Cautillo (1967-1996)

Krzysztof Kieślowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkʂɨʂtɔf kʲɛˈɕlɔfskʲi]  ( listen); 27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996) was an influential Polish film director and screenwriter, known internationally for his film cycles The Decalogue and Three Colors.

Contents

Early life

Kieślowski was born in Warsaw and grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. At sixteen, he briefly attended a firefighters' training school, but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 because it was run by a relative. He decided to become a theatre director, but at the time there was no specific training program for directors, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step. He was raised Roman Catholic and retained what he called a "personal and private" relationship with God.[1]

Career

Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieślowski applied to the Łódź Film School, the famed Polish film school which also has Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda among its alumni. He was rejected twice. To avoid compulsory military service during this time, he briefly became an art student, and also went on a drastic diet in an attempt to make himself medically unfit for service. After several months of successfully avoiding the draft, he was accepted to the Łódź Film School on his third attempt.

He attended from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieślowski quickly lost his interest in theatre and decided to make documentary films. Kieślowski also married his lifelong love, Maria (Marysia) Cautillo, during his final year in school (m. January 21, 1967 to his death), and they had a daughter, Marta (b. January 8, 1972).

Kieślowski died aged 54 on March 13, 1996, during open-heart surgery following a heart attack, and was interred in Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. His grave is located within the prestigious plot 23 and has a sculpture of the thumb and forefingers of two hands forming an oblong space—the classic view as if through a movie camera. The small sculpture is in black marble on a pedestal slightly over a meter tall. The slab with Kieślowski's name and dates lies below. He was survived by his wife Maria and daughter Marta.

Documentaries

Kieślowski's early documentaries focused on the everyday lives of city dwellers, workers, and soldiers. Though he was not an overtly political filmmaker, he soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities. His television film Workers '71, which showed workers discussing the reasons for the mass strikes of 1970, was only shown in a drastically censored form. After Workers '71, he turned his eye on the authorities themselves in Curriculum Vitae, a film that combined documentary footage of Politburo meetings with a fictional story about a man under scrutiny by the officials. Though Kieślowski believed the film's message was anti-authoritarian, he was criticized by his colleagues for cooperating with the government in its production.

Kieślowski later said that he abandoned documentary filmmaking due to two experiences: the censorship of Workers '71, which caused him to doubt whether truth could be told literally under an authoritarian regime, and an incident during the filming of Station (1981) in which some of his footage was nearly used as evidence in a criminal case. He decided that fiction not only allowed more artistic freedom, but could portray everyday life more truthfully.

Polish feature films

His first non-documentary feature, Personnel (1975), was made for television and won him first prize at the Mannheim Film Festival. Both Personnel and his next feature, The Scar (Blizna), were works of social realism with large casts: Personnel was about technicians working on a stage production, based on his early college experience, and The Scar showed the upheaval of a small town by a poorly-planned industrial project. These films were shot in a documentary style with many nonprofessional actors; like his earlier films, they portrayed everyday life under the weight of an oppressive system, but without overt commentary. Camera Buff (Amator, 1979) (which won the grand prize at the Moscow International Film Festival) and Blind Chance (Przypadek, 1981) continued along similar lines, but focused more on the ethical choices faced by a single character rather than a community. During this period, Kieślowski was considered part of a loose movement with other Polish directors of the time, including Janusz Kijowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Agnieszka Holland, called the Cinema of Moral Anxiety. His links with these directors (Holland in particular) caused some raised eyebrows within the Polish government, and each of his early films was subjected to censorship and enforced re-shooting/re-editing, if not banned outright (Blind Chance was not released domestically until 1987, almost six years after it was completed).

No End (Bez końca, 1984) was perhaps his most clearly political film, depicting political trials in Poland during martial law, from the unusual point of view of a lawyer's ghost and his widow. It was harshly criticized by both the government and dissidents. Starting with No End, Kieślowski's career was closely associated with two regular collaborators, the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner. Piesiewicz was a trial lawyer whom Kieślowski met while researching political trials under martial law for a planned documentary on the subject; Piesiewicz co-wrote the screenplays for all of Kieślowski's subsequent films. Preisner provided the musical score for No End and most of the subsequent films; the score often plays a prominent part in Kieślowski's films and many of Preisner's pieces are referred to within the films themselves. In these cases, they are usually discussed by the films' characters as being the work of the (fictional) Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer. The Decalogue (1988), a series of ten short films set in a Warsaw tower block, each nominally based on one of the Ten Commandments, was created for Polish television with funding from West Germany; it is now one of the most critically acclaimed film cycles of all time. Co-written by Kieślowski and Piesiewicz, the ten one-hour-long episodes had originally been intended for ten different directors, but Kieślowski found himself unable to relinquish control over the project; in the end, each episode featured a different director of photography. Episodes five and six were released internationally in a longer form as A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love respectively. Kieślowski had also planned to shoot a full-length version of Episode 9 under the title A Short Film About Jealousy, but exhaustion eventually prevented him from making what would have been his thirteenth film in less than a year.

Foreign productions

Kieślowski's last four films were foreign co-productions, made mainly with money from France and in particular Romanian-born producer Marin Karmitz. These focused on moral and metaphysical issues along similar lines to The Decalogue and Blind Chance but on a more abstract level, with smaller casts, more internal stories, and less interest in communities. Poland appeared in these films mostly through the eyes of European outsiders. The four films were his most commercially successful by some distance.

The first of these was The Double Life of Véronique (La double vie de Véronique, 1990), which starred Irène Jacob. The relative commercial success of this film gave Kieślowski the funding for his ambitious final films, the trilogy Three Colors (Blue, White, Red), which explores the virtues symbolized by the French flag. The three films together garnered a host of prestigious international awards, including the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, in addition to receiving three Academy Award nominations.

Casting

Kieślowski often used the same actors in key roles in his films, including:

Legacy

Kieślowski's grave

Kieślowski remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works included in the study of film classes at universities throughout the world. The 1993 book Kieślowski on Kieślowski describes his life and work in his own words, based on interviews by Danusia Stok. He is also the subject of a biographical film, Krzysztof Kieślowski: I'm So-So (1995), directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki.

After Kieślowski's death, Harvey Weinstein (then head of Miramax Films, which distributed the last four Kieślowski films in the US) wrote a eulogy for him in Premiere magazine. In it he said that Quentin Tarantino saw The Double Life of Véronique at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival and took note of its star, Irène Jacob. He apparently wrote the part of Bruce Willis's wife in Pulp Fiction for her, but she was unavailable for the shoot. She was working on Kieślowski's Three Colors: Red at the time. According to the same article, Tarantino saw Red at Cannes and declared that it would win the Palme d'Or.[2] Instead his own Pulp Fiction received the top prize at the festival.

Though he had claimed to be retiring after Three Colors, at the time of his death Kieślowski was working on a new trilogy co-written with Piesiewicz, consisting of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy. As was originally intended for the Decalogue, the scripts were ostensibly intended to be given to other directors for filming, but Kieślowski's untimely death means it is unknown whether he might have broken his self-imposed retirement to direct the trilogy himself. The only completed screenplay, Heaven, was filmed by Tom Tykwer and released in 2002 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other two scripts existed only as thirty-page treatments at the time of Kieślowski's death; Piesiewicz has since completed these screenplays, with Hell — directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanović and starring Emmanuelle Béart — released in 2005, whilst Purgatory, which is about a photographer killed in the Bosnian war, remains unproduced.[3] Jerzy Stuhr, who starred in several Kieślowski films and co-wrote the script for Camera Buff, filmed his own adaptation of an unfilmed Kieślowski script as Big Animal (Duże zwierzę) in 2000.

Kieślowski said the following in an interview:

“ It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word 'love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or 'fear', or 'suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.[4] ”

Stanley Kubrick wrote the foreword to Kieślowski & Piesiewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, London: Faber & Faber, 1991:

“ 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. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

Stanley Kubrick January 1991 [1]

 ”

Filmography

Documentaries/short subjects

Features and TV fiction

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B05E1D9173BF936A3575BC0A96E958260
  2. ↑ Harvey Weinstein, "In Memoriam - Krzysztof Kieslowski: To Smoke and Drink in L.A." Premiere, June 1996.
  3. ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/apr/14/1
  4. ↑ Patrick Abrahamson Kieślowski's Many Colours, Oxford University Student newspaper, June 2, 1995

External links

Films directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
1970s

Pedestrian Subway (1973) • Personnel (1975) • The Scar (1976) • The Calm (1976) • Camera Buff (1979)
1980s
Short Working Day (1981) • Blind Chance (1981) • No End (1985) • The Decalogue (1989) • A Short Film About Killing (1988) • A Short Film About Love (1989)
1990s
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) • Three Colors: Blue (1993) • Three Colors: White (1994) • Three Colors: Red (1994)