KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI (June 27, 1941 – March 13, 1996)

When the world-renowned and widely beloved filmmaker was a child, he had a normal enthusiasm for the movies but little pocket money, and would settle for a free seat on the roof and an obstructed view of the screen through a vent. A fireman’s school that he attended for three months was not his cup of tea. A distant uncle ran a school for theater technicians and facilitated the boy’s admission. As Kieslowski used to point out, in the spirit of such films of his as Blind Chance, if his uncle had run a bank, he would have become a banker. What he became, in the words of his biographer, friend, and frequent interpreter on the festival circuit, Annette Insdorf, was a man who “made intimate motion pictures about fallible human beings for thoughtful spectators”. (For Insdorf’s personal and insightful biography, Double Lives, Second Chances, click HERE.)

Young Krzysztof attended a vocational school for theater technicians from 1957 to 1962, aiming to become a theater director. To get the prerequisite advanced studies he applied to the State School of Theater, Film and Television in Lodz, but was not admitted until his third try. In the mean time he worked as a dresser for actors at Warsaw’s Teatr Wspolczesny (Contemporary Theater), many of them stars who would later appear in his films.

As Insdorf and others have pointed out, Kieslowski’s very first student shorts anticipated both the subtly subversive documentarian and the subsequent creator of narrative films that magically capture the role of chance and transcendence in human life: first The Office, a sardonic look at bureaucracy, and then The Tram, a microcosm of Kieslowski’s obsession with chance, choice, and longing, in which boy races for tram, notices girl, girl smiles, falls asleep, boy debarks, and then thinks twice and races for the tram again.

Kieslowski graduated in directing from the film school in 1968, with his diploma film, From the City of Lodz, his affectionately ironic portrait of a crumbling industrial town. Apart from a few films for television, most of Kieslowski’s documentary work was based at the Documentary Film Studio, a state enterprise that over the years afforded varying degrees of scope for personal expression. Many of his documentaries expand upon the ironic observations of The Office, ostensibly honoring the dedication of workers but quietly revealing the mismanagement and dilapidation within which they had to work, as in Factory, Before the Rally, Hospital, and Railway Station.

In a number of films in the genre of “talking heads”, Kieslowski took a similarly oblique approach to social and political criticism, as in X-Ray, in which the “normal world” to which a succession of tuberculosis patients long to return is itself rather bleak; and Talking Heads, in which a representative sampling of ordinary Poles describe what they “would like” and thus say much about what is missing in their world. Kieslowski was an exceptionally compassionate documentary filmmaker, refusing to let two of his most interesting documentary portraits be aired on television to spare his subjects possible embarrassment or retribution, including From the Point of View of a Night Porter.

Though politics was not his greatest interest – that, in the long run, was the inner life of human beings – it was his films that touched on the political situation that seemed repeatedly to suffer from “bad timing” vis a vis the authorities. In 1971, following the bloody suppression of strikes in Gdansk the year before, he made Workers ’71, with a premonitory workers’ slogan as its sub-title, Nothing About Us Without Us. His attempt to capture the real views of the workers at the time was so successful that the film was never shown but was later re-edited by Polish Television over Kieslowski’s protests and shown without credits as “The Masters”.

His later feature film The Calm, in which Kieslowski was less interested in the subject of corruption than in the moral dilemma it posed for his protagonist, was filmed in 1976, a year of crucial strikes and harsh repressions, and so shelved by the censors and not premiered until three weeks after the signing in 1980 of the famous “August agreements” in the Gdansk Shipyard that established in principle the Soviet Bloc’s first Independent Self-Governing Trade Unions, known as Solidarity. And in the liberalized climate of that early “Solidarity period” Kieslowski tackled very directly the worker uprisings of 1976 with his TV film A Short Working Day, which he finished editing three weeks before the imposition of martial law in December 1981, when his film was promptly shelved and he had to start driving cabs. The film was not broadcast until 1996. His next film, made that same fateful year, the theatrical feature Blind Chance – and one of his early masterpieces – had somewhat better luck in getting released in 1987.

But even as a film student, Kieslowski had dreamt of making films that directly captured the intimate stories of real people. The one film that he felt came close to achieving that aim was First Love, in 1974, a “cinema verite” look at an expectant teenage couple coping with the social and bureaucratic hurdles to their establishment of a family. The film won the top prize at the widely respected International Festival of Short Films in Krakow, but Kieslowski had mixed feelings about certain manipulations of events (events that were to happen anyway) necessitated by essentially budgetary considerations. He also had qualms about showing real people at their most vulnerable moments, and began to pursue his interest in the inner life of man and in relations between people through the narrative form. But for a long time his experience in documentary colored his approach to story-telling in feature films.

The first narrative film since his student days was the 1973 half-hour television drama, Underground Passage (Pedestrian Underpass), in which he could explore the most intimate aspects of a failed marriage through actors, filmed in a public setting in documentary style. In 1975 he made his first feature-length TV film, Personnel, drawing in large part on his own early experiences in theater technology school and as a dresser.

The film that first brought Kieslowski wide international acclaim was Camera Buff, focusing through the lens of his own experience, and in a documentary style, on the life of an accidental documentary filmmaker, with its early exhilaration and eventual moral dilemmas. Along with the brilliant actor Jerzy Stuhr, who worked with him on writing the dialogue, Kieslowski used many non-actors, including members of one of Poland’s ubiquitous amateur film clubs, and the director Krzysztof Zanussi playing himself.

The 1984 feature No End was an uncompromisingly bleak look at the loss of hope following the crackdown on Solidarity. It was also the film on which Kieslowski first worked with Krzysztof Piesiewicz as co-scriptwriter, because of his legal training, and with the composer Zbigniew Preisner, and their teamwork led to the Kieslowski classics for which the director is best known worldwide – The Decalogue, almost certainly the most consistently powerful television series ever made, The Double Life of Veronique, and the Three Colors Trilogy – Blue, White, and Red.

After Red, Kieslowski claimed it would be his last film, but in fact he and Preisner were already working on a trilogy about Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.

It is hard to describe the deeply personal impact that Krzysztof Kieslowski has had through his films on film students, filmmakers, film critics, and “ordinary” people, film buffs or otherwise. Few filmmakers have so consistently struggled with the attempt to convey deeper truths about the world around them and the world within – to explore the mysterious interplay of chance and choice in human affairs. Which is why so many rank him among the world’s greatest filmmakers.