My radiant light
A new digitally restored 4K box set from Criterion of the final work of Polish master Krzysztof Kieślowski is cause for joy, celebration and sorrow.
(Irene Jacob in Red, the concluding chapter of the Three Colors trilogy, and the final work of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Images courtesy of Criterion.)
In November 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski made his final visit to Chicago. His magisterial Dekalog, his extraordinary series of ten one-hour films loosely based on the Ten Commandments, was circulating on the North American festival circuit.
Kieślowski was at the height of his artistic powers. The series moved from tragedy to freewheeling black comedy by exploring with beauty, tension and grace the interior lives and quotidian details of the residents of a Warsaw housing complex.
Kieślowski was not a moralist or particularly religious (“I leave that to the priests,” he said). He was a dark and somber ironist whose stories of fate, chance, love and vulnerability achieved a depth of expression and emotional intensity that was unforgettable.
The works were obliquely political—the ethical and moral conundrums the characters experience feel very connected to the director’s remarkable documentaries—and touched on the tense social and political tumult occasioned by the first Polish-born Pope, Jean Paul II, the Solidarity trade union movement, the imposition of martial law and the collapse of communism.
He wrote the films with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a human rights lawyer who originally broached the idea. Kieślowski also used nine different cinematographers, often working in highly varied and different visual textures. Dekalog was also a showcase for the depth and range of Poland’s greatest actors like Boguslaw Linda, Krystyna Janda, Olgierd Łukaszewicz, Daniel Olbrychski, Grażyna Szapołowska, Jerzy Stuhr and Zbigniew Zamachowski.
Stanley Kubrick was an admirer. He wrote a brief foreword to the published scripts, saying about Kieslowski and Piesiewicz: “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.”
The political collapse of communism and Poland’s liberation from the Soviet sphere meant a fundamental disruption to the state-supported film system. Kieślowski was confronting those implications.
I will never forget what he said that afternoon in Chicago. “It used to be that we had money and no freedom. Now we have freedom and no money.”
Fortunately Kieślowski’s heightened artistic profile in the West gave him cache and opened new opportunities. He developed a new business and artistic relationship with the industrious, shrewd and gifted Romanian-born French producer and exhibitor Marin Karmitz, of MK2.
(Not coincidentally, Karmitz also became the sponsor and advocate of one of the great directors of the era, the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.)
The director’s late French period became the artistic and political summation of his remarkable career. His life and those films are always going to be an essential part of the discourse, no matter how far removed.
Kieślowski was now in artistic exile, unmoored from home. His work achieved greater verve and virtuosity. He took on the intractable, a system that by its very nature meant a lack of definition or meaning, and he made it sing.
With The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colors trilogy, Kieślowski created bracing, formally intelligent, highly expressive works that gain new shape, resonance and meaning with each passing year.
Now Criterion has just published a mesmerizing and visually stunning 4K high definition edition of Blue, White and Red.
Talk about feeling reborn.
(Julie Delpy in White. Images courtesy of Criterion.)
Looking back, it is almost impossible to conjure or reconstruct the excitement and anticipation of those three films. Astonishingly, the three films were shot, edited and completed in just ten months. They premiered successively at the three most important European film festivals—Venice (1993), Berlin (1994) and Cannes (1994).
I still remember where I was the first time I encountered each part—Blue (1993), that September in Toronto; White (1994), at an early June Chicago press screening; Red (1994), another September afternoon in Toronto.
The motifs and formal patterns—of chance, fate, coincidence, love, desire, beauty—echo and play off each other with a ruminative, devastating cumulative power.
The films, inspired by the French flag, colors, and national slogan of the Revolution—liberté, égalité, fraternité—constitute acts of witness, of being and wonder, and meditating on what it means to be alive at the end of the twentieth century.
In Blue, Juliette Binoche achieves a peculiar freedom, liberty and independence in the aftermath of a tragedy. In her extreme self-negation, she achieves a transcendent grace and wonder.
With White, sardonic, playful, colorful, Zbigniew Zamachowski rebrands and rejuvenates himself as a freewheeling entrepreneur in the new political and social order, that in the director’s exquisite shift from tragedy to farce becomes a restorative sexual comedy of remarriage with his estranged wife (Julie Delpy).
In Red, the strongest and most accomplished of the films, Irene Jacob is a student and model whose life intersects with two very different men, a law student (Jean-Pierre Lori) and misanthropic retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant).
Kieślowski has returned with his most significant collaborators, Piesiewicz, composer Zbigniew Preisner, and three different cinematographers, Slawomir Idziak (Blue), Edward Klosinski (White), and Piotr Sobocinski (Red).
Like Dekalog, the three parts are shot in distinctive and different stylistic registers, bound by theme and mood.
Idziak, who also shot The Double Life of Veronique, works in tight formation, elliptical, opaque, fractured; Klosinski, the crucial collaborator of Andrzej Wajda and husband of Poland’s greatest actress, Janda, works off gradations of light and shape; Sobocinski binds the three films, using color expressively and imagistically into an almost musical fugue.
One of the supreme pleasures of having this bound collection is the ability to go back and forth, checking out parts, and pieces, seeing how they cohere or connect, floating in the imagination with a fluidity and solidity.
The openings of the three films are now easily cross-referenced—the undercarriage of the car moving across the open highway in Blue, a suitcase passing through the conveyor belt in White, the interconnected and massive communication power lines in Red.
In Blue, the color is steely, formidable, self-lacerating, like the sequence with Binoche at the pool. In White, the color is ironic, buoyant, weirdly blank or darkly humorous, like one of my favorite moments.
Zamachowski, after being illegally repatriated to Poland, is mistakenly abducted, beaten and literally left for dead in harsh wintry countryside. In the garbage strewn and white, snow covered landscape, he cries out: “Home at last.” In Red, the color appears, as if conjured from thin air, as every day emblems and signifiers, a bowling ball or passing car.
Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Kieślowski was to some extent an artist out of place, or time. His greatest Polish feature, No End, was suppressed and censored by the communist authorities. The French films tended to be much better received in America or Britain than France, for instance.
The films are the films, and they were not made in a vacuum. No matter how far Kieślowski ventured outside Poland, his sensibility, meaning and manner was always self-evident. The bystander who witnesses the fatal car crash at the start of Blue is like the stranger or wanderer (Artur Barcis) who turns up in various chapters of Dekalog.
Zamachowski and Stuhr play brothers in White, extending on and rhyming off a similar dynamic, in the themes and moral undercurrents of the closing part of Dekalog.
Like Dekalog, where the protagonist of one part might suddenly appear in another action, Zamachowski and Delpy are briefly viewed in Blue, and Binoche during a crucial courtroom scene in White, and all the characters are reunited at the end of Red.
Symbolically each color takes on different, contrasting or overlapping meanings: blue is often open, beautiful, diaphanous, wondrous, except with Kieślowski it becomes harsh and unforgiving.
White is also contradictory, blank, regenerative, clear, euphoric. Red is probably the most violent and descriptive, underscoring an intensity of feeling, jealousy, pain, rivalry, embarrassment, fear, dislocation, or even death.
(Red and white are also the Polish colors.)
Over time and many viewings of each, my central aesthetic and critical response is largely unchanged. In order of accomplishment and artistic success, I’d list them, in order, Red, Blue, White.
Curiously, White is the one I have probably watched the most (I did a great interview with Zbigniew Zamachowski that a friend translated that unfortunately appears permanently lost).
The filmmaker’s fifteen year run from his international breakthrough Camera Buff to the end of the trilogy is about as dense, rich, meaningful, emphatic and ecstatic a body of work as I know of a comparable period.
I still remember the shock and sadness I felt that March morning when I learned of his death. The realization of the next trilogy he planned with Piesiewicz was inherited by others.
As the only completed work proved, only Krzysztof Kieślowski could make a Kieslowski movie.
Juliette Binoche, as Julie, in Blue. (Images courtesy of Criterion.)
The 4K digital restoration of Three Colors is now available in a 4K and Blu-ray combo edition and Blu-ray edition from Criterion. Dekalog and The Double Life of Veronique are also available from the same publisher.
Three Colors, Veronique and many of the director’s key Polish works are also available to stream at the Criterion Channel (www.criterionchannel.com). A subscription is required.