November 6, 2018 (XXXVII:11) Krzysztof Kieslowski: BLUE (1993, 98 min.) Online versions of The Goldenrod Handouts have color images & hot links: http://csac.buffalo.edu/goldenrodhandouts.html

DIRECTED BY Krzysztof Kieslowski WRITING scenario: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz; scenario collaborators: Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, and Slawomir Idziak PRODUCED BY Marin Karmitz MUSIC CINEMATOGRAPHY Slawomir Idziak (director of photography) FILM EDITING Jacques Witta PRODUCTION DESIGN Claude Lenoir SET DECORATION Lionel Acat, Christian Aubenque, Jean- Pierre Delettre, Julien Poitou-Weber, and Marie-Claire Quin

CAST Juliette Binoche...Julie Vignon (de Courcy) Benoît Régent...Olivier (as Benoit Regent) Florence Pernel...Sandrine Charlotte Véry...Lucille (as Charlotte Very) Hélène Vincent...La journaliste (as Helene Vincent) Philippe Volter...L'agent immobilier Claude Duneton...Le médecin Hugues Quester...Patrice (Mari de Julie) Emmanuelle Riva...La mère Florence Vignon...La copiste Daniel Martin...Le voisin du dessous Jacek Ostaszewski...Le flutiste Catherine Therouenne...La voisine Yann Trégouët...Antoine (as Yann Tregouet) Alain Ollivier...L'avocat Isabelle Sadoyan...La servante Pierre Forget...Le Jardinier Philippe Manesse Arno Chevrier after 1985’s No End, his first collaboration with writer Krzysztof Idit Cebula Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner, a creative team that Stanislas Nordey was sustained through the rest of Kieslowski’s filmmaking Jacques Disses career. He began to draw attention from filmmakers like Stanley Michel Lisowski Kubrick and critics like in the late 1980s with the Yves Penay release of the 10-part series of short films based on the Mosaic Philippe Morier-Genoud…Le juge (The Judge) Decalogue (Dekalog, 1989)* for Polish television. One of the ...Dominique extended shorts in this series granted him permission to enter the Zbigniew Zamachowski...Karol Karol main competition at Cannes. He expanded parts V and VII of Alain Decaux…Himself (Eulogist at the funeral) Dekalog into longer feature-length films, A Short Film About Killing (1988)* and (1988),* the former KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI (b. June 27, 1941 in , winning the Jury and FIPRESCI prizes and nominated for the Mazowieckie, Poland—d. March 13, 1996 (age 54) in Warsaw, Palm d’Or at Cannes in 1988. When The Double Life of Mazowieckie, Poland) wrote most of the 41 feature-length and Véronique* was first screened at Cannes, in 1991, Georgia short films he directed. It is thought that his work was only Brown, of the Village Voice, declared: “Anything I say about [the beginning to be recognized soon before his untimely death in film] is merely a labored minuet danced around my own ecstatic heart surgery in 1996, though he had announced his retirement in response.” The Financial Times’s Nigel Andrews commented, “I 1994 after premiering Three Colors: Red* at that year’s Cannes believe we are being hypnotized in The Double Life of Véronique Film Festival. Still, he was indicating plans for a new trilogy . . . How else to explain the ability of a French-Polish film with a based on the Dantean framework of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. nonsensical plot premise . . . to enthrall and enchant us like no Growing up in a Polish Communist regime that placed a European film in recent history?” The film won the Prize of the premium on socialist-realist aesthetics, he began work as a Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI Prize and was nominated for documentary filmmaker. Even, as a filmmaker, conforming to the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1991. With the release of Three the demands of socialist-realism, his work was imbued with Colors: Red in 1994, he was nominated, once again, for the Palm questions and insights that interrogated the limits of the material d’Or at Cannes, and, the following year, he was nominated for world. His career is often broken into films he made before and Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Writing. These are Kieslowski: BLUE—2 the other films he directed: Tramway (1966 Short),* The Office writing. He has written for 14 films: A Short Film About Killing (1966 Short), Zdjecie (1968 TV Short documentary),* Z miasta (1988 writer),* A Short Film About Love (1988 writer),* Dekalog Lodzi (1969 Documentary short),* Fabryka (1971 Documentary (1989 TV Mini-Series, written by - 6 episodes, writer - 4 short), Bylem zolnierzem (1971 Documentary short), Robotnicy episodes),* The Double Life of Véronique (1991),* Three Colors: 1971 - Nic o nas bez nas (1971 Documentary), Przed rajdem Blue (1993 scenario),* Three Colors: White (1994 scenario),* (1971 Documentary short),* Refren (1972 Documentary short),* 2001 Silence (2001), Heaven (2002 screenplay), Hell (2005), Podstawy BHP w kopalni miedzi (1972 Documentary short),* Nadzieja (2007 trilogy "Heaven, Hell and Purgatory", written Murarz (1973 Documentary short),* Pedestrian Subway (1974 by), Uit Zicht (2009 Short, original screenplay), and Wander and TV Short),* First Love (1974 TV Movie documentary),* Burn, the Endless Stars (2018). Przeswietlenie (1974 Documentary short), Life Story (1975 * Indicates films Kieslowski directed Short),* Personnel (1975 TV Movie),* The Scar (1976),* Slate (1976 Documentary short),* Szpital (1977 Documentary short),* ZBIGNIEW PREISNER (b. May 20, 1955 in Bielsko-Biala, Nie wiem (1977 Documentary),* Siedem kobiet w róznym wieku Slaskie, Poland) studied philosophy and history in the university (1979 Documentary short),* From a Night Porter's Point of View of Cracow. In his twenties he started to study music as an (1979 Documentary short),* (1979),* Kartoteka autodidact: listening to records and learning to write by breaking (1979 TV Movie),* The Calm (1980 TV Movie),* Talking Heads down what he was hearing. He then began to make compositions. (1980 Documentary short),* Dworzec (1980 Documentary In 1981 he began collaborating with filmmakers. While working short),* Short Working Day (1981 TV Movie),* with Antoni Krauze, he met director Krzystof Kieslowski who (1987),* Siedem dni w tygodniu (1988 Documentary short),* City invited him to work on No End (1985), a film about Poland under Life (1990 segment "Siedem dni w tygodniu"), Three Colors: the martial law at the beginning of the 80s. With that movie he Blue (1993),* and Three Colors: White (1994).* began a very close collaboration with Kieslowski and his *Indicates films Kieslowski wrote and directed screenwriter Krzystof Piesiewicz. He has composed for 72 films, some of which are: Prognoza pogody (1983), I Like Bats (1986), The Lullaby (1986), Is It Going to Be a War? (1986 Documentary short), A Short Film About Killing (1988),* A Short Film About Love (1988),* Dekalog (1989 TV Mini- Series),* The Last Schoolbell (1989), City Life (1990), Europa Europa (1990), Eminent Domain (1990), The Double Life of Véronique (1991), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), Kieslowski: Dialogue (1991 TV Movie documentary), Olivier, Olivier (1992), Damage (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Three Colors: Blue (1993),* On the Edge of the Horizon (1993), Three Colors: White (1994),* When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), Three Colors: Red (1994),* Mouvements du désir (1994), Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-So... (1995 Documentary), The Island on Bird Street (1997), FairyTale: A True Story (1997), Migrations (1997 Short), Foolish Heart (1998), The Last September (1999), Dreaming of Joseph Lees (1999), Aberdeen (2000), Between Strangers (2002), It's All About Love (2003), KRZYSZTOF PIESIEWICZ (b. October 25, 1945 in Warsaw, Strange Gardens (2003), SuperTex (2003), 1966-1988: Mazowieckie, Poland) studied law at Warsaw University and Kieslowski, cinéaste polonais (2005 Video documentary short), began practicing in 1973. Through the late 1970s he became Sportsman of the Century (2006), A Secret (2007), Angelica increasingly involved in political cases, defending opponents of (2015), Lady of the Dynasty (2015), Valley of Shadows (2017), the Communist regime, serving as a legal advisor for Solidarity, and Lies We Tell (2017). and assisting in the successful prosecution of the murderers of * Indicates films Kieslowski directed Jerzy Popiełuszko. In 1982, he met Krzysztof Kieślowski, who was planning to direct a documentary on political show trials in SLAWOMIR IDZIAK (b. January 25, 1945 in Katowice, Poland under martial law. Piesiewicz agreed to help, though he Slaskie, Poland) has done cinematography for 67 films, including doubted whether an accurate film could be made within the A Short Film About Killing (1988), “Dekalog, piec” from constraints of the judicial system; indeed, the filmmakers found Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Véronique (1991), and Three that their presence in court seemed to be affecting the outcomes Colors: Blue (1993 director of photography) for Kieslowski. In of cases, often improving the prospects of the accused, but 2002, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best making it hard to capture judicial abuses. Kieślowski decided to Cinematography for the Ridley Scott war film Black Hawk Down explore the issue through fiction instead, and the two (2001). These are some other films he has done cinematography collaborated for the first time as writers on the feature film No for: Kazdemu to czego mu wcale nie trzeba (1966 Short), Heart End (1985). He remained Kieślowski’s collaborator throughout Attack (1967 Short), Zbrodniarz, który ukradl zbrodnie (1969), the rest of the director’s career. He was nominated, in 1995, with Pedestrian Subway (1974 TV Short), A Woman's Decision Kieslowski for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay (1975), The Scar (1976), The Conductor (1980), From a Far Written Directly for the Screen for Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994). Country (1981), A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984 director of Since Kieślowski’s death, he has remained engaged with film photography), Paradigma (1985), Tears of Stone (1995), Kieslowski: BLUE—3

Jailbirds (1996), Men with Guns (1997), Gattaca (1997 director acted in 46 films before dying of a brain aneurism in 1994. These of photography), I Want You (1998 director of photography), are some other films he acted in: La femme intégrale (1980), Bundle of Joy (2000), King Arthur (2004), Harry Potter and the Stella (1983), Dangerous Moves (1984), Hell Train (1985), Order of the Phoenix (2007 director of photography), Battle of Rouge-gorge (1985), Subway (1985), Bleu comme l'enfer (1986), Warsaw 1920 (2011), Measuring the World (2012), and A Tale of A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986), 'Round Midnight Love and Darkness (2015 director of photography). (1986), Noir et blanc (1986), A Flame in My Heart (1987), Savannah (1988), The Gang of Four (1989), A Soldier's Tale (1989), Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989), Dr. M (1990), Three Colors: Blue (1993), Grand bonheur (1993), Attendre le navire (1993), Three Colors: Red (1994), Du fond du coeur (1994), En mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît (1995), ...à la campagne (1995), and Black for Remembrance (1995).

FLORENCE PERNEL (b. June 30, 1966 in Paris, France) had her acting breakthrough in Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), a role that earned her a César award nomination in the "Best female debut" category. She has an uncredited role in Three Colors: White (1994). Pernel played the role of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's second wife, Cécilia, in the 2011 biopic The Conquest. She has recently assumed a recurring role of prosecutor Elisabeth Richard in a series of TV murder mysteries: Murder in Aveyron (2014), Murder in Lozère (2014), Murder in Aigues-Mortes (2015), and Murder in Luberon (2018). She has acted in 87 films and television series. These are some JULIETTE BINOCHE (b. March 9, 1964 in Paris, France) is other films and television series she has acted in: Plein soleil affectionately known by the French press simply as "La (1973 TV Movie), Tarendol (1980 TV Movie), Girls (1980), Binoche.” She was only 23 when she first attracted the attention Salut... j'arrive! (1982), The Man Inside (1990), Mauvaise fille of international film critics with the 1988 film adaptation of (1991), L'écrivain public (1993), In Praise of Older Women Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable (1997), Violetta, the Motorcycle Queen (1997), Long Live the Lightness of Being. Her performance in that film gave famous Republic (1997), Le juge est une femme (1993-2002 TV Series), film critic Roger Ebert the impression that she was “almost Napoléon (2002 TV Mini-Series), Agathe (2003 TV Movie), Je ethereal in her beauty and innocence,” and image she resisted in t'aime à te tuer (2006 TV Movie), La mémoire de l'eau (2007), her turn as a woman having an affair with her fiancé’s father in Le coach (2009), Dumas (2010), 3 Femmes en colère (2013 TV 1992’s Damage. She has also, famously, resisted many Movie), La clef des champs (2014 TV Movie), Caïn (2016-2018 opportunities for mainstream Hollywood roles, in particular TV Series), Un Mensonge oublié (2018 TV Movie), and rejecting three different offers from Steven Spielberg, fairly early Conspiracy of Silence (2018 TV Series). in her acting career. She appeared in Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), Three Colors: White (1994) and Three Colors: Red JULIE DEPLY (b. December 21, 1969 in Paris, France) made (1994). She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a her first short film at age 12, then wrote her first screenplay at Supporting Role in 1997 for The English Patient (1996), and she age 16. Later, when she started to act, she saved the money she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a earned to help pay her way through the film program at New Leading Role in 2001 for Chocolat (2000). She won Best Actress York University. She first got the attention of Jean-Luc Godard at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for Certified Copy (2010 Copie who cast her, at fourteen, in his 1985 film Détective. She has conforme). In all, she has acted in 73 films. These are some of written for 12 films and was nominated, with her other performances: Liberty belle (1983), Hail Mary (1985), and , for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Family Life (1985), My Brother-in-law Killed My Sister (1986), Adapted Screenplay for both (2004) in 2005 and Roundabout (1989), The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Wuthering for Before Midnight (2013) in 2014. She has directed 9 films, Heights (1992), The Horseman on the Roof (1995), Jet Lag produced 4 films, composed for 4 films, and edited for 2 films. (2002), In My Country (2004), Caché (2005), Paris, je t'aime She has acted in 62 films, including Kieslowski’s Three Colors: (2006), A Few Days in September (2006), Flight of the Red Blue (1993), Three Colors: White (1994) and Three Colors: Red Balloon (2007), Certified Copy (2010), Another Woman's Life (1994). She is also a frequent actor in Linklater’s films, most (2012), Godzilla (2014), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Endless notably, the aforementioned Before Trilogy: Night (2015), 7 Letters (2015), Slack Bay (2016), Let the (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). These Sunshine In (2017), Vision (2018), Double Lives (2018), High are some other films she has acted in: King Lear (1987), The Life Dr. Dibs (2018), and Who You Think I Am (2018). Dark Night of the Soul (1989), Europa Europa (1990), Voyager (1991), Killing Zoe (1993), The Three Musketeers (1993), An BENOIT REGENT (b. August 19, 1953 in Nantes, Loire- American Werewolf in Paris (1997), Crime and Punishment Atlantique, France—d. October 22, 1994 (age 41) in Schaffouse, (1998 TV Movie), The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999 TV Movie), Switzerland) is primarily known for his acting in Kieslowski’s MacArthur Park (2001), Waking Life (2001), Intimate Affairs Three Colors: Blue (1993) and Three Colors: Red (1994). He (2001), Beginner's Luck (2001), Looking for Jimmy (2002), Kieslowski: BLUE—4

Frankenstein (2004 TV Mini-Series), Broken Flowers (2005), front of the camera by a staged element. Kieslowski did not The Legend of Lucy Keyes (2005), The Hoax (2006), Guilty emphasize the aesthetic function of the image, but stressed its Hearts (2006), 2 Days in Paris (2007), real and literal meaning. (2012), The Bachelors (2017), and Burning Shadow (2018). His feature films have a similar orientation: he concentrated on the explication of an individual’s situation in the ZBIGNIEW ZAMACHOWSKI (b. July 17, 1961 in Brzeziny, society and politics, on the outer and inner bounds of man with Lódzkie, Poland) acted in 115 films, including Kieslowski’s the objectively existing world, and on the search for connections Dekalog (1989) and Three Colors: Blue (1993), Three Colors: between the individual and the general. He often placed his White (1994) and Three Colors: Red (1994). He has also heroes in situations where they have to make a vital decision (in appeared in films such as: Wielka majówka (1981), Rycerze i his TV films The Staff and The Calm, and in his films for rabusie (1984 TV Series), The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober theatrical release). (1988), Escape from the 'Liberty' Cinema (1990), Pestka (1995), The Amateur is the synthesis of his attitudes and artistic Demons of War (1998), Proof of Life (2000), The Pianist (2002), search of the 1970s, and is also one of the most significant films Distant Lights (2003), The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003), Cialo of the “cinema of moral unrest.” In the story of a man who buys Adam Dizel (2003), Popieluszko. Wolnosc jest w nas (2009), a camera to follow the growth of a newborn daughter, and who Operation Dunaj (2009), Within the Whirlwind (2009), Walesa: gradually, thanks to this film instrument, begins to realize his Man of Hope (2013), Gods (2014), Journey to Rome (2015), responsibility for what is happening around him, the director Persona Non Grata (2015), Be Prepared (2017), Taxing Love placed a profound importance on the role of the artist in the (2018), and Pitbull: Last Dog (2018). world, on his morality, courage, and active approach to life. Here Kieslowski surpassed, to a large extent, the formulaic restrictions of the “cinema of moral unrest” resulting from the outside-the art essence of this trend. These restrictions are also eliminated in his following films. In The Accident (made in 1981, released in 1987) he extended his exploration of man and his actions by introducing the category of the accidental. The hero experiences the same events (Poland in 1981) three times, and is therefore given three destinies, but each time on a different side. Two destinies are more or less given by accident, the third one he chooses himself, but even this choice is affected by the accidental element. The transcendental factor appears in No End (a dead man intervenes in worldly events), but the film is not an exploration of supernatural phenomena so much as a ruthless revelation of the tragic period after the declaration of the state of from The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia. Ed. Andrew emergency in December 1981, and a demonstration of the Sarris. Visible Ink, Detroit, NY, 1998. Entry by Blazena professed truth that private life cannot be lived is isolation from Urgosikova the public sphere. In the late 1970s, when the conflict between the State In the 1980s Kieslowski’s work culminated in a TV and the citizens of Poland was imminent, a new trend emerged in cycle and two films with subjects from the Ten Commandments. cinematography—the “cinema of moral unrest.” All the films in A Short Film about Killing is based on the fifth commandment this trend have one common denominator: an unusually cutting (Thou shalt not kill), while A Short Film about Love comes from critical view of the state of society and its morals, human the sixth. Both films and the TV cycle are anchored in the relationships in the work process, public and private life. It is present and express the necessity of a moral revival, both of the more than logical that Krzysztof Kieslowski would have individual and the society, in a world which may be determined belonged to this trend; he had long been concerned with the by accidentality, but which does not deliver us from the right and moral problems of the society, and paid attention to them duty of moral choice. throughout his film career with increasing urgency. The direction After the fall of communism when, as a consequence of of his artistic course was anticipated by his graduation film From changes in economic conditions, the production of films the City of Lodz, in which he sketched the problems of workers, experienced a sharp fall in all of Eastern Europe, some Polish and by his participation in the stormy protest meeting of young directors sought a solution to the ensuing crisis in work for filmmakers in Cracow in 1971, who warned against a total foreign studios and in co-productions This was the road taken by devaluation of basic human values. Kieslowski, and so all his films made in the 1990s were created A broad scale of problems can be found in the with the participation of French producers: The Double Life of documentary films Kieslowski made between shooting feature Veronique and the trilogy Three Colours: Blue, Three Colours: films: disintegration of the economic structure, criticism of White, Three Colours: Red—loosely linked to the noble motto of executive work, and the relationships of institutions and the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. In these films individuals. These documentaries are not a mere recording of Kieslowski followed up on his films from the 1980s in which his events, phenomena, or a description of people and their heroes struggle with the duality of reason and feelings, behaviour, but always an attempt to look underneath the surface. haphazardness and necessity, reality and mystery. Even in these The director often used non-traditional means. Sometimes the films made abroad we can also trace certain irony and sarcasm word dominates the image, or he may have borrowed the which first appeared in his films made in the 1970s in Poland. stylistics of slapstick or satire, or he interfered with the reality in Kieslowski: BLUE—5

She can’t define herself in relation to him. She can’t say ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you’. There’s nothing she can do yet the jealousy torments her as if he were still alive. She tries to fight it off and she does so in an absurd way. She suddenly becomes so good that she’s too good. But she can’t get out of the trap. She puts it quite clearly at a certain moment in the film, that all this is a trap: love, pity, friendship…. All three films are about people who have some sort of intuition or sensibility, who have gut feelings. This isn’t necessarily expressed in dialogue. Things are very rarely said straight out in my films. Very often everything that’s most important takes place behind the scenes, you don’t see it. Either it’s there in the actors’ play or it isn’t, Either you feel it, or you don’t.

Jonathan Romney: Krzysztof Kieslowski - interview for Three Colours Blue (The Guardian, 1993) Kieslowski on Kieslowski. Edited by Danusia Stok. Faber and Introducing a Krzysztof Kieslowski film on television a Faber, London & Boston, 1993. few years ago, Lindsay Anderson commented that what he most Editor’s Note: This chapter on Three Colours (Barury) is based associated with Polish cinema was a quality of seriousness. No on conversations I held with Krzysztof Kieslowski in Paris in one, he added, better exemplified this seriousness than June 1993 when he was still editing Blue, White and Red, A Kieslowski. Some people consider Kieslowski to be the finest rough cut had already been made of Blue. film director currently working in Europe that he's among the most serious there can be no doubt. Blue, white, red: liberty, equality, fraternity. It was His seriousness has an allure that can keep an audience Piesio’s idea that having tried to film the Decalogue, why in awestruck thrall - which is not always the best critical shouldn’t we try liberty, equality, fraternity? Why not try to response a film-maker could wish for. His films are sparing with make a film where the commanding dictums of the Decalogue their humour and their moral gravity is of the sort that brooks no are understood in a wider context? Why not try to see how the argument. Kieslowski favours the large themes. His acclaimed Ten Commandments function today, what our attitude to them is series of television films, The Decalogue (1988), illustrated the and how the three words liberty, equality and fraternity function Ten Commandments. His last feature, The Double Life Of today?—on a very human, intimate and personal plane and not a Veronique, addressed life, death and the elusive nature of philosophical let alone a political or social one. The West has identity. His new trilogy, Three Colours (Blue is released today implemented these three concepts on a political or social plane, with White and Red to follow), takes on the values of Liberty, but it’s an entirely different matter on the personal plane. And Equality and Fraternity. that’s why we thought of these films. For devotees of the art-house tradition at its most Blue is liberty. Of course it’s equality too. And it can sombre, Kieslowski belongs in the lineage of Bergman and just as easily be fraternity. But the film Blue is about liberty, the Tarkovsky, who figure in his own pantheon. He is another of imperfections of human liberty. How far are we really free? those northern directors whose austerity suggests an …To love is a beautiful emotion but in loving you uncompromising vision with transcendental import. A former immediately make yourself dependent on the person you love. documentarist, he made films in the 1970s and 1980s that dealt You do what he likes, although you may not like it yourself, directly with the hard political realities of everyday life in because you want to make him happy. So, while having these Poland, notably Blind Chance and No End. But it was The beautiful feelings of love, and having a person you love, you start Decalogue's more abstract moral concern that put him on the doing a lot of things which go against your own grain. That’s world map as an object of auteur adulation. how we’ve understood freedom in these films. On the personal Fans of The Decalogue tend to be so reverent that it is level. hard not to wonder whether there isn't less to these dramas than In Blue the prison is created by both emotions and memory. Julie meets the eye. Visually prosaic, the series had enough elusive probably wants to stop loving her husband because it would symbolism and gravitas of pacing to make it more resonant than make it far easier for her to live. That’s why she doesn’t think its anecdotal nature seemed to allow for. The Double Life Of about him. That’s why she’d forgotten. That’s why she doesn’t Veronique, on the other hand, was extremely stylised, Slawomir visit the cemetery and never looks through old photographs. Idziak's baroque photography bringing an eerie depth to an When someone brings her old photographs, she says she doesn’t already elliptical story (Idziak achieves similar wonders in Blue). want to see them. We don’t actually show this in the film but it Kieslowski is anxious to play down the mystery becomes clear later on that she’s refused them. She wants to quotient of his work, but he's not inclined to give too much away. forget all this. But is it really possible to forget? There comes a 'My part of the work is to make the film. Your part is to find moment when she begins to feel fine. She starts to function something in the film, or perhaps not. For me it's always normally, smile, go for walks. So it is possible to forget. Or at important to hear viewers' interpretations. They turn out to be least try to forget. But suddenly there’s jealousy and she can’t get very different to my intentions. I don't hide my intentions. I rid of it. She becomes a prisoner of a jealousy which is absurd speak about them - but not about my interpretations.' because it concerns somebody who’s been dead and buried for at least six months. There’s nothing she can do for or against him. Kieslowski: BLUE—6

In fairness, Kieslowski cannot be accused of cultivating over by a tractor, things might have been different. 'It's important a gnomic air, but his tendency to reduce questions to to get to the roots of things - the moment when something commonsense basics only fuels the mystique. Interviewing him actually started happening.' through an interpreter, you get a sense of somehow skirting the This approach is illustrated at the start of Blue. The heart of the matter, and his Polish intonations - a drawl with story is about to begin with a car crash Kieslowski gives us peculiar dying cadences - contrive to make him sound either advance notice by showing a close-up of an oil drip. But, he dismissive or excessively self- stresses, this is just chance: it's deprecating. futile to look for a greater why. On his relationship with 'Every day thousands of his audience, Kieslowski people die in car accidents. manages to suggest that he's at Sometimes it's slippery, once out to make his meaning sometimes somebody falls crystal clear, and the exact asleep, perhaps a screw comes opposite. 'Whatever stage I'm at undone. I'm not for with a film, whether I'm writing investigating accidents, I'm just the script or editing, I always saying there was an accident, a look at it from the point of view man and a girl died, and then I of the viewer - what he's start thinking what's going to expecting, the way he'd like me happen with the woman who's to entrap him and the way he'd like to be released from the trap, left behind.' when he wants to be surprised, when he wants to laugh, when he Kieslowski's films seem to invoke metaphysical wants to cry. You could describe my job as a game with the imponderables while at the same time shrugging them off. But viewer - to give him what he wants but at the same time covertly when things resist explanation, meaning is invested in the image to slip in something that he might not be expecting.' itself. What really makes Kieslowski's films - which, arguably, That covert something is, one imagines, the sense of the he pulls it off with complete success only in Veronique - are transcendental. 'People are looking for this,' he agrees, 'but it's those images that don't easily translate into words. It happens not because of a particular director or film. I think they need when Irene Jacob's face breaks out into a radiant grin as rain falls something like that, because what they have isn't enough. What on it, or when we're given a luminously bloated glass globe to they already have isn't explained to them - the sense of getting up contemplate at leisure. in the morning, the sense of its history, sometimes of religion or When the images do fit concepts, then beware. of politics, a sense of the terrible. Kieslowski has a tendency to overburden objects with glaring 'The Stalinists used to get up in the morning to kill their symbolism: candle wax drips like tears on the face of the Virgin opponents and pull their fingernails out - we're always looking a wasp struggles out of a glass just as a dying man rallies round a for some meaning in life. Throughout history and even now, devil's-head car ornament signals doom. And yet Kieslowski has there are lots of us trying to find out a sense of why we're here, insisted, 'I don't film metaphors … For me a bottle of milk is a but nobody ever has.' bottle of milk.' In Blue, he explains, 'Juliette Binoche's face is The vagueness and open-endedness of his narratives reflected upside down in a spoon. Spoons reflect images upside suggest that Kieslowski is something of an old-school down.' existentialist. Things simply happen, who knows why, and This denial of meaning seems disingenuous. Veronique, people just have to react to them. In his notes for Blue, he makes for example, was remarkable for the way Kieslowski turned it clear that the theme of freedom is meant in a non-political funding circumstances to his advantage. Working with French sense: 'We're talking about individual freedom, a profound co-production money, he devised a story about a girl who dies in freedom, freedom of life.' Poland and her double who goes on living in France. Clearly his It's debatable, though, how far-reaching Kieslowski's symbolic farewell to Poland? 'It wasn't my intention for it to be a films really are as moral inquiries. In The Decalogue, the symbol of anything. A girl dies in Poland, that's all.' detached style gets us close to the characters' anxieties, but The fact that he has been working in France, Kieslowski ultimately shrugs them off as unknowable. In Veronique and in claims, is strictly a matter of funding, even though his new Blue, he goes even further - the elaborate camera work and trilogy refers to the tricolour flag and a set of values dear to the unworldly beauty of Irene Jacob and Juliette Binoche make his Gallic heart. 'These concepts touch on everybody, not just heroines all but opaque. France. If you ask Arafat's warriors what they're fighting for, Conversely, there's often an over-statement that seems they'll say exactly the same - liberty, equality, fraternity. Ask the intrusive in A Short Film About Killing (from The Decalogue), Bosnians or the Serbs, they'll say the same. The concepts the argument against capital punishment comes across as themselves are just pretexts to make films.' incongruously rhetorical. Nevertheless, the three concepts have provided him with As a moral observer, Kieslowski again keeps his options some philosophical grist. 'They're impossible to attain from the open. 'I do think people are good. It's just situations that put them point of view of individuals. Politically, perhaps - apart from into terrible predicaments, although of course human beings like equality, of course. You can say, I want to be free, but how do to create their own situations.' He explains that the young you free yourself from your own feelings, your own memories, murderer of The Decalogue, who kills a taxi driver for no your own desires? Perhaps we can't function without them - apparent reason, is basically good if his sister hadn't been run Kieslowski: BLUE—7 which automatically means we aren't free, we're prisoners of our solipsism, Kieślowski’s critique of a lifestyle often expounded in own emotions.' 1990s popular culture as a kind of freedom—that of the “Me As yet, it's hard to evaluate Blue, which has left many Generation.” viewers feeling dissatisfied, especially in the light of a cryptic, Another layer of, perhaps unconscious, social critique portentous closing sequence. Perhaps Kieslowski would advise arises out of the contradictions of Julie’s decision. The new sceptics to wait and see how the rest of the trilogy develops? identity that she adopts so aggressively—albeit while striving not 'Absolutely no. I'd say, don't buy any more tickets.' to be cruel—can be seen as an embodiment of a certain idea of feminism, of a desire to no longer be dependent on even the concept of a male partner, the maternal instinct, or the family unit, things that are now ashes in her mouth. In the context of this film, Kieślowski seems to be frowning upon Julie’s decisive isolationism, one that may also be linked to an older, bohemian idea of how artists should live. And this points to a key question posed by the film: Who really was the artist of the couple? Is Julie, as the film hints many times, the actual composer of the music we hear, or was she at least an equal partner in its creation? What this repositioning of Julie’s injured idea of self does for Blue is provide room for all these speculations about who or what she may become, and let us empathize with her self- transformation, because we, too, are freed, to some extent, of the Nick James: “Blue: Bare Necessities” (Criterion notes) baggage of who she was. The film binds itself to her. She still The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three looks every inch the creative consort of a successful artist, but we Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem soon see with what detailed thoroughness this young woman sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching sloughs off the worldly rewards of her husband’s fame, as if she this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three seeks some spiritual solace in being ordinary—and in the Colors trilogy corresponds to the three hues of the French process, the film brings her closer to the audience. tricolor, and also to the French national principles of liberty, But the first thing from her past that Julie can’t escape is equality, and fraternity, and that Blue refers, however loosely, to in her head. In the most ironic sense of the cliché, she must face liberty. It’s also generally said that Blue is an antitragedy, just the music. It’s when a snooping journalist greets Julie at the as White is an anticomedy and Red an antiromance. Yet so hospital where she’s recovering that she hears the first burst of a manifold and bittersweet are the ironies at work in Blue that loud orchestral movement that momentarily shuts out everything these framing ideas do little to help us face its creative challenge, else—it is a section, we discover, of a concerto to commemorate which is to understand and empathize with someone to whom we the reunification of Europe. Yet this is a kind of shutting-out she might otherwise feel no connection—someone we might even doesn’t want, one that transports her back to the creativity that envy or resent—a relatively wealthy woman blessed with talent links her to her dead family. The music strikes at key moments and good looks, as she freezes out everyone she knows. throughout the film, suffusing Julie in blue light. Not even Blue’s idea of freedom is willfully perverse. Julie de holding her breath underwater can drown it out. Courcy (Juliette Binoche), at the peak of her powers, seeks to Binoche gives a brilliant minimalist performance, erase all trace of her former life with her classical composer putting much of herself into it, and indeed, she and Julie seem to husband and their daughter, both of whom are killed in a car have much in common. Blue came at a pivotal moment in crash that she survives in the film’s opening minutes. That Binoche’s career. The daughter of an actress and a sculptor, she former life is eloquently evoked in just a couple of images of first made her mark at the age of twenty-two, as the muse of the Julie’s daughter: the child’s hand holding a sheet of creased blue notoriously difficult French auteur Leos Carax, starring in his tinsel out of the car window; a medium shot of the girl looking debut film, Mauvais sang (1986). Her breakthrough international curiously out the back window as the car goes through a tunnel. success came opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Philip Julie’s subsequent attempt at self-negation suggests Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). By the more than one interpretation. Unable to go through with suicide, time she’d illuminated Carax’s hubristic romantic epic Les she wants to disengage, to be cold, to isolate herself in a low-key amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) with her life-affirming presence, she existence. Since she can’t physically do away with herself, she was the hottest art-house actress on the scene. Then beauty and tries to do so psychologically, to annihilate her persona by fame took her down some blind alleys: Peter Kosminsky’s rather removing all the props and trappings that made her who she was. chocolate-box production of Wuthering Heights and Louis Kieślowski and coscreenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz at first Malle’s faintly tawdry Damage (both 1992). Blue came along at present this fragile new life as a kind of limbo, a space in which precisely the right moment for her. It restored her in the eyes of Julie can limit her world to the bare necessities. But the way her her art-house fans, who recognized that she was now a new existence is depicted is full of the ambiguities typical of this formidable actress as well as a screen icon. director-screenwriter pairing. On the one hand, Julie’s modishly Kieślowski encouraged Binoche to wear her own spare apartment is a pleasant refuge, but in the context of the clothes, to be the chic woman-about-Paris that she was in 1993: film’s moral questions about love and what binds people together transcendently beautiful—pale, dark-haired, feminine yet slightly materially, it can also be seen as a manifestation of contemporary boyish—intelligent, self-possessed, pragmatic. We can soon tell Kieslowski: BLUE—8 that her Julie doesn’t have the ruthlessness to carry through her reclaim her past life, including control of the property (much of plan to completion—the sight in her flat of mice with babies which she’ll give away), and break out of her overwhelming forces her to borrow a cat from a neighbor, but she can’t watch grief. the consequences. Julie’s flaw, in this context, is her conscience. Kieślowski is the master of the telling detail, and She is not, after all, so seeing Blue again makes me think invulnerable that she can do that he is one of the great without help. And this is originators of what has become the perhaps the script’s turning international style of so many films point, the moment when shown at festivals, films that favor Julie reluctantly has to break low-key acting, an oblique the carapace she has created approach to subject matter and and face humanity again, the scenes, the off-kilter photographic moment when some sense of image, and patience with passing community becomes time. What his imitators’ work necessary to her. This often seems to lack, however, is the change is reinforced when lyrical intensity we see in Blue’s another neighbor, Lucille— mise-en-scène, and the adroit use of who cleaned up for her after images suggestive of the inner life. the cat had done its work— The prologue of the few moments panicked by her father’s visit leading to the car crash is itself a to the club where she works as a stripper, asks Julie to come and master class in pared-down visual storytelling, but its very see her. austerity leads us easily into Julie’s reduced world, in which I once described Julie as an anti–femme fatale, by which breath on a feather, or the distorted reflection of a white-coated I meant that she destroys the memory of her man after the fact of physician in her eye, simultaneously describes her fragility and his existence, and she remains fairly enigmatic despite the film’s the diminished field of her awareness. focus on her. We assume she was a good wife and mother, and Some critics feel that the later phase of Kieślowski’s one of the few clear things we learn about her husband is what he work, from The Double Life of Véronique (1991) on, is too thought of her: “That you are good and generous,” she is told. glossy and politically vague when compared with his Polish “That’s what you want to be. People can always count on you.” work, but what Blue and the rest of the trilogy have that the The other telling detail about him is that he liked to repeat the earlier films lack is a much greater ambition to tackle the punch lines of jokes. This is a typical barbed bouquet from enormities of the day—the unification of Europe being the most Kieślowski and Piesiewicz—the husband told jokes, so maybe he obvious idea put under the microscope. In 2002, I suggested to was a fun guy; but he repeated the punch lines, so maybe he was readers of Sight & Sound that Blue should be considered a a pedant. serious candidate for one of the top ten films of all time in a poll One thing that seems clearer in retrospect about the the magazine conducts every ten years. Though I conceded that films Kieślowski and Piesiewicz made together—from No Kieślowski’s film might seem of modest reach when set beside, End (1985) onward to Kieślowski’s final film, Red (1994)—is say, Citizen Kane or Battleship Potemkin, the objection how immersed in legal issues they are. Piesiewicz was a lawyer, disappeared for me both in the context of the trilogy as a whole and his forensic approach to moral dilemmas seems as powerful and when I considered how rich a portrait of spiritual survival in a force in the trilogy as Kieślowski’s humanist pessimism the contemporary world Blue was painting. To me, the film (though both, finally, are subordinated to an aesthetic that some seemed, and still seems, to examine the feminist rallying cry have dubbed the “agnostic sublime”—see the ending described “The personal is political” with greater scope and sensitivity than below). Some of the central questions at the heart of Blue are any other. And its rich ambiguities leave enough room for us to what constitutes a person’s property and what is the ethical way see that the price of freedom depends on what kind of freedom to disburse the trappings of a life now ended. Julie, the widow, is you want. clear that she wants none of the actual physical property, but But nothing in a Kieślowski film is ever when she uncovers an unknown part of her husband’s existence straightforward, and Blue’s ending gives us one of the great (one connected obliquely to the law—it causes her to blunder examples in cinema of that supposedly masculine idea of briefly into a courtroom scene from 1993’s White), she feels woman’s unfathomability, the Gioconda smile. In a montage guilty that she failed to notice any hint of her husband’s secret seen while the completed concerto’s choral ending plays, with life. It is this discovery that brings her the clarity of vision about lyrics drawn from Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we are her life that she had lost and tried to regain by stripping reminded of the people who have crossed Julie’s path—Antoine everything away. Knowing that her husband was not exactly (the hitchhiker who witnessed the accident), Lucille, Julie’s who he seemed to be allows her to be less tough on who she was mother—who constitute the community she can’t shake off. At herself. This is the moment of recognition, amplified by all the the very end, Julie is in tears, but right at the last moment, the earlier, unavoidable encounters with people who broke through corners of her mouth turn a tiny bit upward. Binoche says she her shield—including the ones with her Alzheimer’s-stricken smuggled the smile past Kieślowski, so in this case, the source of mother (played by Emmanuelle Riva), whose mind has already the image may be female after all. In any case, Julie’s smile does erased Julie, mocking her attempts at self-negation. Instead of not necessarily mean that Blue’s ending is “happy” in a freeing herself, Julie had imprisoned herself. Now she is able to conventional sense, for surely the prime lesson of Kieślowski’s Kieslowski: BLUE—9 film is the one so difficult for the Me Generation to swallow. It is reached agreement that we would film his idea of a history told that absolute freedom and love are opposites. from the point of view of the audience, with a young and unknown director, Pavel Lozinski. If TOR was Kieślowski’s bedrock from the early seventies, the filmmaker forged two further essential relationships while making the fiction film No End (1985). Earlier, while researching a documentary about the courts, Kieślowski had encountered the lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, and when he came to make No End, a film about the consequences of a lawyer’s death during martial law, it was to Piesiewicz that he went, to suggest that they cowrite the script. This collaboration was to last until Kieślowski’s death in 1996. Similarly, the music for No End was provided by Zbigniew Preisner, who thereafter would compose for all of Kieślowski’s films. It was this formidable team that sat down in the late eighties to plan The Decalogue. Although the original intention “Three Colors: A Hymn to European Cinema” (Criterion had been to use several directors, in the end, Kieślowski directed notes) them all. During this frenetic period, he and Piesiewicz also In 1989, the Communist rule that had dominated began to think that the films might have international appeal, and Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War collapsed German television came in with the money to allow two of them with astonishing rapidity. If the long-term political, economic, to be turned into full-length features. The one based on the sixth and ideological consequences of Europe’s reunification are still commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—was screened at Cannes unfolding, there was an immediate and extraordinary artistic in 1988 and, under the title A Short Film About Killing, became result, as Polish and French cinema came together to provide a an international hit. climax to the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski. In a remarkable burst of creative energy from 1988 to 1994, the filmmaker was to The final component of the infrastructure underpinning write and direct fourteen films, culminating in Three Colors—the Three Colors now came into play. Marin Karmitz’s family had trilogy made up of Blue (1993), White (1993), and Red (1994)—a fled Communist Romania in the immediate postwar era, and he feat for which there are few parallels in the history of the cinema. had built up one of the most important distribution and exhibition Kieślowski in this period went from being a well-respected companies in France, MK2. That company now became the lead filmmaker within his own country to being one of the all-time partner in Kieślowskis next film, the Franco-Polish greats of world cinema. The trilogy itself, his final work, almost coproduction The Double Life of Véronique (1991), starring defies belief: written, shot, and edited in less than three years and French actress Irène Jacob. She won best actress at Cannes for screened in succession at Venice, Berlin, and Cannes, so that for her performance, and Miramax picked up the film in America— one year, Kieślowski dominated art cinema as no one ever had, where it grossed $2 million, an amazing feat for such an . or likely ever will again. All the elements were now in place for Three Colors. Kieślowski’s apprenticeship had been long and thorough. By the time he came to make The Decalogue in 1988, These films gather many of Kieślowski's earlier a series of ten hour-long films for Polish television based on the concerns, particularly the role of coincidence and chance in life, Ten Commandments, he already had behind him training at the and take them to a level both more personal and more abstract. Łódź film school, the most famous film school in Europe, and a Each film elaborates one of the great ideas of the French long career as a documentary filmmaker, as well as a number of Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. However, prize-winning features. Perhaps just as significant, he had Kieślowski is not interested in these slogans politically; indeed, it developed a series of collaborations that were to form the would be fair to say that, for Kieślowski, the final collapse of infrastructure that would enable him to work at a furious creative Communism merely acknowledged the end of politics, which pace. The first and arguably most important was with Studio had so obsessed Europe for two hundred years, and had been so Filmowe TOR, which Kieślowski joined in 1974 and which was prominent in his earlier films and life. Instead, the films explore to provide constant backing during both his struggles with what these concepts can tell us about life: we are presented with Communist censorship in the seventies and eighties and his Julie, who must break free from the ties that bind her to her dead adventurous experiments with Western funding in the nineties. I husband and daughter; Karol, who must find equality with his remember well that when I first asked Kieślowski, as he was French wife, who so despises and misuses him; and Valentine, editing Red, to participate in a film celebrating a hundred years who discovers in her relationship with a snooping judge a of Polish film—part of the sixteen-country Century of Cinema genuine fraternity absent in her life with her boyfriend, with his project, in which great directors were asked to make personal petty jealousy. But it would be completely wrong to think that histories of their own national cinemas—he was adamant that, these interpretations, or any of the other allegories that one can whatever his own interest, he would do nothing without the lay out—so that equality in White, for example, is also about the approval of TOR. I remember even better the day spent in TOR’s inequality between East and West in Europe—in any way cramped offices in Warsaw, where Kieślowski sat, smoking more exhaust the films’ multiplicity of meanings. Indeed, it is more cigarettes than I have ever seen a human being smoke, listening helpful to understand these themes as one of the elements that intently to the negotiations but never intervening, until we had Kieślowski uses to make each scene and each shot pregnant with Kieslowski: BLUE—10 meaning—for the individual films and, even more dizzyingly, for history of the cinema who most recognizes the claims of the trilogy as whole—which, in the end, the viewer can make narrative closure while also recognizing the falsifying sense of only in terms of his or her own life. simplicities of narrative. As a counterpoint to the great ideas of the Revolution When Kieślowski said that he was retiring from are the three colors of the French flag: blue, white, and red. The directing after Red, it was easy to read it as a gesture of colors punctuate each of their films, adding yet another layer to exhaustion. However, it may be as true that Kieślowski saw that the rich palimpsest that Kieślowski creates from his gripping what he had achieved in these films marked a cross-fertilization narratives. For they are all at the service of his abiding concerns: of the two great postwar European cinemas that could never be that each moment is full of infinite possibility, that our lives are surpassed. He had composed the hymn to Europe that provides connected and interconnected in ways that we can never fully such an important plotline in Blue, and his song was sung. grasp. The conclusion of the trilogy, when our major characters ————— emerge from a tragic accident, both delivers the pleasure of a For more on Kieslowski, see Doug Cummings’ excellent article happy ending and leaves us all too aware of the five hundred on him in Senses of Cinema’s Great Directors series: deaths that the narrative has not had time for—an open ending http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/kieslowski/ without equal. This continuous reflection on the act of filmmaking never becomes coy or pretentious, but Kieślowski, in these final works, shows that he is perhaps the director in the

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2018 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 37: NOV 13 ALAN MAK AND WAI-KEUNG LAU, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, 2002…. NOV 20 MARTIN SCORSESE, THE DEPARTED, 2006…. NOV 27 TOM MCCARTHY, SPOTLIGHT, 2015…. DEC 4 JOHN HUSTON, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, 1975

SPRING 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS, SERIES 38 (PRELIMINARY LIST) JAN 29 Paul Fejös, Lonesome 1928 FEB 5 Frank Borsage, A Farewell to Arms 1932 Feb 12 Gregory La Cava, My Man Godfrey, 1936 Feb 19 John Huston, African Queen 1951 Feb 26 Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless 1960 Mar 5 Luis Bunuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1962 Mar 12 David Lean, Dr. Zhivago 1965 Mar 19 recess Mar 26 Arturo Ripstein, Time to Die 1966 Apr 2 Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up 1966 Apr 9 Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter 1978 Apr 16 Monty Python, The Meaning of Life 1983 Apr 23 , Eyes Wide Shut 1999 Apr 30 Terrence Malick, Tree of Life, 2011 May 7 Alfonso Cuarón, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 2004

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