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Krzystztof Kieslowski
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Occupation: Director
Also: Screenwriter
Born: June 27, 1941, Warsaw, Poland
Died: March 13, 1996, Warsaw, Poland
Education: Lódz State Theatrical and Film College
Leading Polish director whose films are most influenced by those of his countrymen
Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Kieslowski began making documentaries which focused
on the cultural, political and economic problems which sparked the emergence of the
Solidarity movement. His award-winning 1979 feature,
Camera Buff, a slyly humorous,
satirical look at life in a corrupt provincial factory, may have had personal dimensions
for Kieslowski as it depicts a filmmaker who exposes himself to both attention and
criticism when he progresses from home movies to committed social documentaries. (It
featured a cameo by Zanussi playing himself.)
Kieslowski learned firsthand that censorship
may ride on the coattails of exposure with
Blind Chance (1981), which considered three
possibilities for Poland's political future as it explored three different outcomes
springing from the premise of a student trying to catch a train. Blind Chance was unable
to include a fourth story in which Poland throws out the Communist Party entirely, and the
remaining film, still quite impressive, was banned for over five years before finally
being released in 1987. While the outcome of one Blind Chance story was a blithely
apolitical world (the student misses the train, and instead meets a sexy woman with whom
he becomes involved), Kieslowski's subsequent
No End (1984), while not forsaking wit
entirely, nonetheless refused to be glibly satirical. The film's hero, a lawyer who
represented many Poles oppressed by martial law, is dead at the film's opening.
Like Zanussi's work, Kieslowski's films always featured philosophical journeys into the human
spirit and a concern for the moral and ethical implications of human action. Fittingly, he
confirmed his status as a major contemporary director with
The Decalogue (1988-89), an ambitious
series of ten hour-long films funded by Polish TV, telling stories "based" on
the Ten Commandments. (In Decalogue 10, for instance, two brothers, an accountant and a
punk rocker, both covet the stamp collection they have inherited from their father.) In
the same year, Kieslowski expanded segments five and six into two features,
A Short Film About Killing and
A Short Film About Love. Partially set, like the rest of the series, on
a Warsaw housing estate, A Short Film About Killing is a grim and powerful tale drawing
formal parallels between the act of murder and the workings of the criminal justice
system.
Kieslowski ventured even closer to the realm of the human heart and soul and
shifted further away from the political realities of contemporary Poland with his first
international co-production, The Double Life of Veronique (1991). A more conventional art
house item, the film, not surprisingly, gave his career greater international exposure
than ever before as it strikingly and intensely paralleled the lives of two remarkably
similar women who appear to be doppelgangers. With his acclaimed trilogy,
Blue (1993),
White (1994) and
Red (1994), based on the tricolor themes of liberty, equality and
fraternity represented in the French flag, Kieslowski, proffering a densely plotted
network of chance meetings and mutually destructive relationships, once again used the
alienated female psyche as a vehicle for his recurrent social and metaphysical
ruminations. Later in 1994 he announced his intention to retire from filmmaking.
In March 1996, Kieslowski died due to heart complications in
a Warsaw hospital, but not before announcing tentative plans for another trilogy
rumored to be based upon the concepts of heaven, hell, and purgatory.
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