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FEATURE FILMS BY KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI
Cast: Juliusz Machulski (future film director, as Romek), Irena Lorentowicz, Wlodzimierz Borunski, Michal Tarkowski (Sowa), Andrzej Siedlecki (Andrzej), Tomasz Lengren, Tomasz Zygadlo, Janusz Skalski, and others. Kieslowski’s first feature-length film is ostensibly about the theater’s anonymous backstage workers: the tailors, painters, modelers. They are creative individuals devoted to their work and vital to a theater’s success. But given the traditional cult of the actor, these craftsmen are underestimated by actors and audience alike. The film’s protagonist, Romek, is a student at a theater technical college. A sensitive young man fascinated by the magic of theatrical art, he finds his first job in the tailoring workshop of the opera. Quickly confronted with the reality behind the scenes - the bickering, petty jealousies, vindictiveness and corruption - his illusions are shattered. His elder colleague, the tailor Sowa, finds himself targeted by an hysterical actor, and socio-political organizations in the theater want to use Romek against Sowa. Kieslowski’s made-for-television microcosm of the society at large, and an early exploration of moral choice in the workplace.
Cast: Franciszek Pieczka (Bednarz), Mariusz Dmochowski, Jerzy Stuhr, Jan Skotnicki, Stanislaw Igar, Stanislaw Michalski, Michal Tarkowski, Andrzej Skupien, Halina Winiarska, Joanna Orzeszkowska, Agnieszka Holland, and others. It is 1970. After some shady negotiations, a decision is made as to where a large new chemical factory is to be built, and Bednarz, an honest Party man, is put in charge of its construction in the small town where he used to live. He takes on the task in the belief that he can build a place where people will live and work in harmony. His intentions and convictions, however, conflict with the hopes of the townspeople. The huge chemical plant is to be established on the site of a primeval wilderness, whereas not far from there – in another province – there are available wastelands. This unfortunate placement exposes the weakening of ties between those making decisions and those who must live with the consequences. With increasing frequency, violent conflicts break out between the inhabitants and the workers. Following the killing in December 1970 of striking shipyard workers at Baltic seaports, Bednarz takes the side of the workers, but at a price. As for Kieslowski, the poet within the social realist is becoming apparent in the way he lingers on seemingly unimportant details.
The protagonist of "Calm" is Antoni Gralak – a worker with a criminal record, and a sensational role for Jerzy Stuhr, who also worked with Kieslowski on the dialogue, as he would on “Camera Buff”. After his release from jail, Gralak realizes that there is no place for him in his family. His former fiancée is not interested in him, either. He leaves his home town of Krakow and sets out to work on a building site in Silesia. All he wants are the simple things in life: work, somewhere clean to sleep, something to eat, a wife, television and peace. Anxious to avoid conflicts and happy to be alive and free, he is friendly with his colleagues, and open-hearted and grateful to his employer. He finds a girl, marries, but conflicts at work prove inevitable. Building materials disappear and Gralak's boss is involved in the theft. Thinking that he's found a potential accomplice in Gralak, the boss proposes to bring him in on the underhanded deals. A strike breaks out among the builders, and Gralak finds himself painfully torn between the two sides - his boss and his colleagues. “The Calm” perhaps more than any of Kieslowski’s early fictions anticipates themes and ideas that he would later explore more fully. "Calm" awaited its premiere four years because it showed a strike. Kieslowski had realized it in the hot year of the 1976 strikes, and the censors kept it “on the shelf” until the even hotter 1980 came along. The film’s TV premiere took place on Sept. 19, less than three weeks after the signing of the famous “August agreements” in the Gdansk Shipyard and the founding of the Solidarity movement. Critics have regarded this work as a precursor of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety.
A benchmark of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety – a trend that dominated Polish cinema of the end of the 1970s, with its films on 30-year-olds who couldn’t find their place in a cosmetically stabilized society – and a uniquely personal examination of the nature of filmmaking, “Camera Buff” launched Kieslowski’s international reputation. Its protagonist, devoted family man Filip Mosz – splendidly played by Jerzy Stuhr (who also worked with Kieslowski on the dialogue) - buys himself an 8mm movie camera to record the first years of his new baby. He becomes fascinated with his new acquisition and his interests turn to filming subjects other than his family. In the factory where he works, his bosses seize the opportunity and appoint him their official chronicler of the factory’s 5th anniversary. Mosz’s films win prizes at amateur contests, and as his creative talents develop so does his desire to record reality as it really is and not as it is officially reported to be. With characteristic subtlety Kieslowski traces the transformation of a shy and private man into an observant artist and social activist, who then begins to discover the limitations on artistic freedom and the price of honesty. At his factory he is confronted with censorship. The management believes his documentary portrait of a disabled worker to be a discredit to their factory even though the person concerned is a model worker. As a result of Filip’s filming, his immediate boss is sacked. For Filip himself, the price is even higher... In the famous last scene, Mosz turns the camera on himself.
It's a critical film about a Party Secretary in a pretty large town 100 kilometers from Warsaw. The film is based on historical facts about the strike in Radom in 1976, which ended with people setting fire to the regional Party Committee headquarters – and the screenplay is based on Hanna Krall’s reportage, “The View from a Second-Floor Window” – but all the main characters are fictional. The film merges archival documentary materials and a fictional recounting of a few hours on one day during the “Radom events”, which prompted the establishment of one of the first organized oppositional groups, KOR (Committee for Defense of the Workers, a forerunner of Solidarity). Already living in poor conditions, workers have started the strike in answer to the Prime Minister’s decree introducing a price increase on meat of 69%. On the following day, June 25, 1976, the First Secretary of the Voivodship (Province) Communist Party’s Committee gets a notice of unrest at a metal enterprise. The first shift has refused to work, and all the workers are in heated discussion. They start marching to Party Committee headquarters. On their way they are joined by workers of other local enterprises. In the headquarters tension grows, especially when they learn that five thousand people are marching. The militia calls for support from other cities. There is no talk here about trouble-makers and fringe groups; the whole working class is on strike. At last, his back against the wall, the First Secretary promises to call Warsaw to ask that the meat price increases be cancelled. The strikers, their numbers growing, demand an immediate response. The situation becomes uncontrollable. The angry crowd sets cars on fire, demolishes buildings, destroys propaganda banners, and shouts: "Down with the power of the red bourgeoisie". It becomes a short day for the First Secretary. And just as Kieslowski’s “Calm” referring to tensions in 1970 was finished during the strikes of 1976 and shelved till the birth of Solidarity in 1980, “A Short Working Day”, shot during the freer Solidarity period, was finished just before the imposition of martial law in 1981, and was not broadcast until 1996, three months after Kieslowski’s death from complications of heart surgery.
An examination of chance and choice that marvelously elaborates upon the theme so simply captured in Kieslowski’s student film, “The Tram”, and that anticipates his later masterpieces. Witek (played with extraordinary intensity by Poland’s megastar Boguslaw Linda) was born in Poznan in 1956 while his father was taking part in the workers’ protest strikes. Now a third-year medical student, he and his widowed father live with his aunt, a Communist since before the war. Witek takes in his dying father’s last words: “no one can force you” to do something. Witek gets the dean’s permission to interrupt his studies and travel to Warsaw. At the last minute he has to run for his train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal moment could influence the rest of Witek's life. One: he catches the train, meets an honest Communist and becomes a Communist Youth organization activist himself, earning rapid promotions. His very dedication leads indirectly to the arrest of his girlfriend, Czuszka (who is engaged in underground printing), whereupon he cuts his ties to the organization, but she’ll have no more of him; so he joins a young activist group preparing themselves for training in France. They don’t leave, as the strikes in Poland are getting really hot: it’s July 1980 and everybody is needed to confront the democratic movement. Two: while running for the train he bumps into a railway guard, is arrested, brought to trial, and sent to unpaid labor in a park where he meets someone from the democratic opposition, for which he becomes a dedicated activist. In conspiracy, working with Father Stefan, he works in a clandestine printing house, offering his apartment for underground meetings. He turns towards Catholicism and accepts baptism. He also meets Daniel, a friend of his father, who was forced to leave Poland in 1968, and his sister: Werka. They start an affair even though Werka is married. Father Stefan wants him to go to France, to a Youth Council, but Witek declines to get a passport since that entails in his case an agreement to collaborate with the secret police. Thus a suspicion that Witek has revealed the address of the underground printing house is doubly painful. When he accidentally catches his aunt listening to a foreign news broadcast, it’s about strikes in Gdansk… Three: he simply misses the train, meets a girl, Olga, from his class at the university, returns to his studies and marries her, and leads a peaceful life as a doctor and father unwilling to get mixed up in politics, refusing either to join the Party or to sign protest letters. But chance gets the better of him. What interests Kieslowski in “Blind Chance” is how the slightest shifts in circumstance can steer the freely taken choices of a single full-grown individual into such diverse potential directions, without compromising his personal integrity. As Kieslowski puts it, „A man is predestined, as it were, to behave in a certain way regardless of the circumstances. The character in this film finds himself on three different paths, but remains essentially the same throughout.”
Kieslowski’s first film with co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner, with both of whom he worked from then on. Shot in the bleak years of martial law, it is also his most widely criticized film: by the Left, by the Right, and by the Catholic Church. In 1982 the ghost of a young lawyer observes the world during Martial Law. Three motifs are interwoven. The lawyer had been preparing to defend a young worker imprisoned for leading a strike, who is now being defended by an older colleague, a less idealistic lawyer more open to compromise. The younger lawyer's widow only realizes after her husband's death how much she loved him and tries to come to terms with her emptiness. And there's a metaphysical element, as explained by Kieslowski: “that is, the signs that emanate from a man who's not there anymore, towards all that he's left behind.” “Kieslowski’s film is bitter and the ending tragic. But it mercilessly uncovers – layer by layer – almost all layers of the dramatic materia of life in today’s Poland," wrote a critic in 1984. Made while Poland was under Martial Law, “No End” is a film about survivors of a dream – the dream of a free Poland, which had seemingly been crushed with the suppression of Solidarity and the protest movement. Award: 1985 Don Quixote Award (of PF Discussion Film Club Award)
At the height of a national debate on capital punishment, this film came as a shock, not only for the graphic brutality of both murder and execution scenes, but for its apparent condemnation of “crime in the name of the law”. A sensation at Cannes, it was also the first film to elicit comparisons between Kieslowski and directors like Bergman. When a youth randomly and brutally murders a taxi-driver, Piotr has just passed his law exams and been admitted to the bar. He must defend the murderer, Jacek. There is no evidence for the defence and no apparent motive. Jacek is put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to execution by hanging. On his way to the gallows Jacek asks Piotr to give his mother a photo of his younger sister (perhaps, if not for her tragic death, he might not have left the countryside and his life would have taken a different turn). In the context of a raw, Kafkaesque urban reality, masterfully pictured by cameraman Slawomir Idziak, the film concentrates on two moments: the cold-blooded murder and a cold-blooded execution. There are no lengthy courtoom scenes, no analysis of the murderer’s psychology. After his first case, Piotr is left with the bitter doubt - does the legal system, in the name of the people, have the right to kill in cold blood?
A sensitive and guileless nineteen-year-old named Tomek has nurtured a growing romantic obsession with an older woman living in the building opposite. Every evening at 9 he puts down his books and observes Magda through a telescope mounted for that purpose. Tomek, a love-starved orphan, gradually gets fascinated by the beautiful stranger. One evening, just when he’s begun to feel deeply in love, a man appears. Tomek cannot look at the tender goings-on, and intervenes using tricks. He does whatever he can to get glimpses of his beloved. When the couple dramatically break up, Tomek declares his love - talking to Magda for the first time. The woman starts a cruel game with the boy but finally, she invites him in. She initiates him into the basic fact of life - there is no love, only sex. She cynically tells Tomek she had played with him. Shattered, he takes drastic measures, and Magda begins to see and feel things differently – through his telescope… One of the best Kieslowski’s films, it is an expanded version of the TV film “Decalogue 6”. "The greatest crime against love is the lack of love" – this is how one of the critics defined the premise of "A Short Film About Love”. Critics and audience enthusiastically praised Grazyna Szapolowska (Magda) and Olaf Lubaszenko (Tomek) for their extraordinary performances.
Though consisting of ten parts, “The Decalogue” is not a television series in the familiar sense. There is no ongoing plot and the characters are different, with the exception of one mysterious, unidentified figure who appears in every part (played by Artur Barcis). What all episodes do have in common is the setting – a huge, impersonal housing project. Overwhelming size, uniform buildings, and the cramped apartments in which both smaller and larger human dramas must play out. Although the individual stories are inspired by the Ten Commandments, it is important to emphasize that Kieslowski and his co-scriptwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz have made them accessible to every viewer regardless of worldview or religious belief. Bare-bones descriptions of their respective plots may make them sound like single threads from the interwoven story-lines of an average soap opera. But Kieslowski is not offering dramatized gossip; rather, he confronts us with the depths of moral ambiguity that haunt us all. The ten parts of “The Decalogue”, like all of Kieslowski’s later films, are distinguished by the artistry of the dialogue, performances, cinematography, and musical scoring.
In taking the First Commandment as their starting point, Kieslowski and Piesiewicz address the question of God’s very existence and contemporary man’s creation of false idols. Krzysztof, a scientist, introduces his beloved little son, Pawel, to the mysteries of the personal computer, a machine which he believes to be infallible. It is not by accident that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz have made the computer an idol – avoiding a literally Biblical interpretation of God’s commandment. It is winter, and Pawel, anxious to try out a new pair of skates, asks his father if he can go out to the local pond which has just frozen over. They consult the computer and determine with great precision and with more than a safe margin of error that the ice will hold the boy's weight. But an unpredictable convergence of meteorological factors is about to threaten the scientist’s faith – and more.
The head of an intensive care unit is a lonely, older man who enjoyes a stable life and the faded memories of his youth. The tranquility of his life is abruptly shaken when the fate of an unborn child is unexpectedly placed in his hands. The expectant mother (Krystyna Janda) is a young violinist whose husband is in critical condition in that very ward. But the child was fathered by another. The violinist has calculated that if her husband lives, she will have an abortion. If he dies, she will have the baby and join its father. What she needs is a clear-cut prognosis. She demands one of the doctor, but her capacity for cold calculation in the most dramatic of circumstances fills him with revulsion, as does the realization that on his prognosis hangs the life of the child. The expectant violinist is not above using God’s name to extract a sworn statement. But the doctor is not above lying to save a life. And Part Two ends on a note of perfect moral ambiguity.
Daniel Olbrychski plays Janusz, a young man who lives with his family. It is Christmas Eve, a night when families are together and nobody wants to be alone. Janusz’s family maintain the superficial formalities of piety, which results in empty rituals on Holy Night, and may account in part for a streak of insincerity and hypocrisy in Janusz. It should be no surprise that Part Three is about much more than dishonoring the Sabbath. Janusz’s ex-lover, the determined Ewa, spoils this Christmas Eve by craftily luring Janusz from the apartment and his family and to wander with her through the city, and with various excuses tries to keep him with her for the night. Their break-up, it had always seemed to Janusz, had been by mutual consent: Ewa had agreed to his returning to his family. But now it seems that her agreement had been a pose forced by circumstances. In fact impetuous and downright predatory, she now tries to revive their relationship. Janusz wants to go home but Ewa is adamant. They part at dawn. One critic observed that Kieslowski presents “the madness of love in its most onerous phase, when it has lost almost all its positive features and, intense as ever, is transformed into a destructive force.”
In his approach to the Fourth Commandment – the first of the seven dealing with human relations – Kieslowski focuses on the taboo against incest. A subtext of potential incest underlies the delicate play of feelings and emotions that unfold between Anka and her father, with whom she has been living since her mother died when Anka was 10. While he is away on a business trip she finds a letter written by her mother on her deathbed and addressed to Anka, claiming that her husband was not the girl’s real father. There may be reason to doubt that, but Anka believes it, and accuses her alleged father of deception. The family tie that bound father and daughter now seems suspended. A different relationship emerges between Anka and Michal as Anka subtly tries to seduce him. Critics have agreed that “Decalogue 4” is one of the most remarkable of the whole series, praising the director, set design, and cinematography, but most of all the actors: Adrianna Biedrzynska and Janusz Gajos, who created characters of extremely different temperaments, inwardly rich and complex.
SEE THE DESCRIPTION FOR „A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING”; “Decalogue 5” is a faithful but more concise version
SEE THE DESCRIPTION FOR „A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE”; “Decalogue 6” is a faithful but more concise version
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