Feature by Peter Fraser
‘Jesus, George, it's a wonder I was ever born.’
- Marty McFly reprimands his younger father
Does the adjective Kieslowskian exist? As far as I’m aware it doesn’t but if terms such as ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Beckettian’, indeed ‘Hitchcockian’ or ‘Godardian’, are reserved for those cultural practitioners whose vision is sufficiently distinctive, sufficiently consistent, to consign it to the dictionary, then Kieslowski’s obsessive brand has claims to similar damnation. Perhaps the acid test is whether having experienced Kieslowski’s cinema we feel that in the circular tracks of a well-worn truism, if his films suddenly didn’t exist then they would have to be re-invented. Forgive me, such a paradox is positively Kieslowskian…
Because it conjures parallel universes to ours in which Kieslowski exists and in which he doesn’t, yet his non-existence pre-supposes existence somewhere else. Perhaps there is a universe in which he did not become disenchanted with the documentary form. Perhaps another in which he never saw Ivan’s Childhood or The 400 Blows, part of his current retrospective at the NFT, and perhaps another in which he was a Frenchman, Christophe, and perhaps never became a filmmaker. One familiar theory of great art, or rather one explanation of its effect upon us, is that the artist expresses something that we always felt, that was always there, but that we could never express so well. So art is a Platonic recognition, revelation as much as creation, which goes to explain why we identify with it, perceiving ourselves parallel within it. If it speaks to us then it reveals a part of ourselves that was dormant, like another self previously hidden.
Krzysztof Kieslowski is best known for Dekalog, broadcast on Polish TV in 1988, and the Three Colours trilogy, completed in 1994. The former took its inspiration from the Ten Commandments, with each hour-long episode dealing with a different commandment, and spawned two longer films, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love. Three Colours dealt with the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and fraternity that became the cri de coeur of the French Revolution and the founding principles of modern France as represented by the three colours of the French flag: blue, white and red.
In the early 1990s Kieslowski recounted a seminal incident during the making of Station, his documentary about ‘people looking for something.’ Kieslowski recalled how he had returned one night to the Polish State Documentary Film Studios to find the police waiting to seize his footage:
‘We only found out later on, once they’d given the film back to us, that on that night a girl had murdered her mother, cut her to pieces and packed her into two suitcases. And, that very night, she’d put those suitcases into one of the lockers at Central Station. […] Right, so we didn’t film the girl. But if we had, by chance? We could have filmed her. If we’d turned the camera left instead of right, perhaps we’d have caught her. And what would have happened? I’d have become a police collaborator. And that was the moment I realised that I didn’t want to make documentaries anymore.’
This from a director who argued vociferously for documentaries in his film school thesis because reality was far richer than art and then pursued documentary filmmaking throughout his early career.
Given that Poland was a communist state at the time, Kieslowski suspected initially that the seizure might be motivated by political suspicions, potentially with undesirable consequences for anyone involved; however that wasn’t why he forsook documentary for the fictional films of his later career.
Nor was it the case that he felt that the murderer in this instance should escape detection. It seems ironic that an incident that seems the very confirmation of his thesis that reality is richer, far richer, than art, and in which his ostensible subject is usurped by another, in which reality takes a hand and implicates him in the lives of the people he is filming, their futures as well as their present, should have prompted him to forsake the documentary form. Yet this ‘might have been’, this astonishing coincidence that evokes the connectedness of things and the complicated, and unforeseeable, repercussions of any decision, precisely captures what we might term Kieslowskian. Not only that, his realization of the filmmaker as informer, almost inevitably betraying the subject, influenced all his subsequent - more lauded - work.
His vocational crisis equally became grist to the mill of his cinema, common amongst his characters most particularly Veronique in The Double Life of Veronique, who has to choose between her vocation, singing, and her life, because if she sings then she is likely to suffer a fatal heart attack. A beautiful premise and given that her identical twin has the same dilemma but takes the opposite decision, it’s fully explored. The film’s two halves and pellucid photography are extremely delicate: 24 fps like the flutter of butterfly wings.
On the subject of astonishing coincidences, the writer Jose Saramango was reportedly once approached by a journalist whose life precisely mirrored a life in one of his novels, yet Saramango had no prior knowledge of the man. Kieslowski was fond of the anecdote and believed in these signs of inter-connectedness. Presumably he would also have admired the Jorge Luis Borges short story Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote in which Menard writes a novel that is identical in every way to Don Quixote yet has no knowledge of his novel’s twin. One question is, are they the same novel? In the story, the narrator argues that Menard’s novel, although identical, is richer because it is later, ensuring more historical allusions.
So the masterpiece is usurped and the literary interloper assumes the Godhead. Kieslowski’s cinema is replete with all-too-human figures forced to assume a God-like role, often because they work in a profession that people look to for judgement. Thus in Dekalog 2 we have a doctor who must decide between the life of an unborn child and that of its father. In Three Colours Red we have the judge who surreptitiously listens to people’s lives but can no longer bring himself to pronounce sentence upon them. It’s as if we are being shown the limits of human judgement compared to the infinite judgement of God.
The very fact that these people look to secular priests (the servants of God are nowhere evident in Dekalog) for guidance in affairs that might have prompted prayer in past times indicates a society that has lost the condolence of religion. Yet the struggles of priest and God surrogates, forced to play both roles in a godless society (and thereby in a sense robbed of their humanity) highlight the discontents of secularism.
It’s no coincidence that Borges’ parable about the complexities of authorship is now considered a ‘post-modern’ text par excellence (all the more so because the self-reflexivity of Don Quixote could be accorded the same slightly spurious status). Nor presumably is it coincidental that the father who thinks to worship another God in Dekalog 1, disobeying the first of the Ten Commandments upon which Dekalog is based, losing his son apparently as a result, is named Krzysztof. The film director is, after all, another profession to whom people look for guidance and in carving graven images he usurps the Creator.
He breaks one of the Judaeo-Christian commandments. No wonder Kieslowski took filmmaking seriously. He wasn’t religious but he was clearly interested in ethical complexities compared to moral reductions.
Regarding his TV series, if you think that the Ten Commandments have no relevance to life today then think again. They stand on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol of which George Dubya was once governor and they are the holy wooden plank to which secular law in modern Judaeo-Christian societies is moored. The question is, in post-modernity when all authorities are in doubt, including any transcendental authority, and neither author nor text is sacred, witness Quixote, how much relevance do the commandments have as an ethical balance sheet for the cost of living? Do they remain a useful measure at least to judge how far life takes us from them, how ethically complex and non-singular life is?
Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future we’re heading back in time to marry our mothers. Reactionaries inclined to equate the Einsteinian revolution with moral relativism might say that like McFly, not only are we breaking the fourth commandment, ‘Honour thy Father and Mother’, with its implicit taboo against incest, but by breaking the fourth dimension, in a Dolorean no less, we’re doing it before we’re even born.
Such is the advance of science. Kieslowski’s work conjures parallel universes that address this fragmentation but intuits something numinous, perhaps divine in the spiritual sense, in the links between them, just as Marty McFly steps from one universe into another when he travels in time. Chicken McFly’s existence in one universe as the teenager who grows up in the 80s, then travels in time, ensures his existence as a teenager in the 50s, who has traveled in time, who might marry his mother and step into a different future. These versions of McFly must have separate universes otherwise they would cancel each other out (McFly in the 50s could not father McFly in the 80s), yet they must also be linked to ensure they both exist (McFly in the 80s is required to create McFly in the 50s). Although anathema to each other, they are mutually dependent just as the two universes of Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique.
In the case of McFly we might say that in his Oedipal desire to mate with his mother and usurp his father he precociously transgresses the patriarchal symbolic, the law that includes such religious inheritances as the Ten Commandments (such as ‘Honour thy…’) and the very chronology of time as embedded in patriarchal narratives. This ruptures the familial structure, which begins to disappear from his photographs. Thus in a liberal society driven by science and economics, religion is transgressed and superseded, the family is destroyed and the teenage son, who partners his mother, replaces the absent father. The patriarchal law enters a postmodern cycle of infinite regression; infinite trivialization compared to infinite transcendence and judgement, as Marty McFly becomes his own father, or fathers himself. The past becomes a postmodern playground for teenage time travelers, Gods become human and vice versa.
Kieslowski’s work is replete with parallel universes. Blind Chance followed the different possible life-outcomes arising from the single moment when the hero runs to catch a train. Each episode of his Dekalog concerns individual lives piled on top of each other, one by one, the concrete crosses on the sides of the buildings stretching towards infinity and evoking the ‘infinite judgement’ of a lost deity, a fearful deity that might unite the universes in one perspective. Then in the Three Colours trilogy Kieslowski turns to parallel lives that epitomize the humanist Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The French writer Michel Houllebecq, very different to Kieslowski, recently said that one of the roots of his much-criticised pessimism is the impossibility of society without religion yet the impossibility of religion given ‘the state of our knowledge.’ After Dekalog, in which Kieslowski (and his co-writer) examine the secular complexities surrounding the Ten Commandments in modern society, the director turns to the humanist values that have superseded them, shadowed by the New Testament values of Faith, Hope and Love. Those lives come together at the close of the third film Red in an extraordinary coincidence that is similar to those in Kieslowski’s earlier work but here is given greater profundity through the way it seals his trilogy and expresses a deeper truth (although alienating some viewers).
That truth is that the values of liberty, equality and fraternity are interrelated, their stories intertwined and inter-dependent, like the characters in Dekalog whose occasional appearances in other episodes reveal to us that one should read between the lines of the Ten Commandments for their broader ethics.
In Kieslowski’s vision they become not dogmatic utterances but fluid injunctions that should be read in relation to each other, inter-dependent as people are, almost as qualifications, and perhaps most radically, socially contingent rather than absolute. Because Blue is set in France, White predominantly in Poland and Red in Switzerland, the interrelationship of the Three Colours trilogy seems also intended to function as a historical and geopolitical interrelation. France is the birthplace of the values that the trilogy explores and those values found its constitution. Poland, who didn’t join the European Union until 2004 but suffered as much as any other country in the horrors of the Second World War and the Cold War, from which the dream of a united Europe arose, has its nose pressed against the glass, seeking equality. Finally in Red we have Switzerland, the country at the centre of Europe whose motto is ‘one for all and all for one’, home of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions, in a film intended to explore fraternity.
These parallel nations and parallel lives bring us back to a Frenchwoman named Veronique and her Polish alter ego Weronika, both with a Kieslowskian choice to make in The Double Life of Veronique.
Kieslowski made his choice and to him it probably felt like a life or death matter to take the road more traveled and leave the documentary form he had valorized. Kieslowski said: ‘Not everything can be described. That’s the documentary’s great problem. It catches itself as if in its own trap. The closer it wants to get to somebody, the more that person shuts him or herself off from it.’ With that choice he emptied his films of surface politics and embraced a sense of the numinous in life. No theist, he made films about the spiritual penumbra of an apparently Godless universe. His later films still capture some of the richness of reality, perhaps in exaggerated fashion, but he came to believe that reality wasn’t enough or rather the documentary form wasn’t enough to capture the Real. His cinema is philosophical. It is metaphysical.
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