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Few expected it, and news of it came with a deep-down jolt, like the surprise death of a friend who'd shown you what good there was in living. Even celebrities die, of course, and while we miss Stewart, Hepburn, and Peck—artists who made figments laugh, sweat, and sorrow, and we along with them—and see in their passing a token of our own, we accept the order of things and move on. The death of Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski in March, 1996, at the age of 54, was more like losing that dear friend.
Yes, when he died Kieslowski was a world-class director at the top of his game—perhaps even, in the not eccentric judgment of Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, "the most accomplished filmmaker in the world." But lots of folks dazzle with a camera. What distinguished Kieslowski above all—what made his sudden absence deeply felt—was the stories he chose to tell and the way in which he told them. The achievement came in the eerie, enveloping, worlds he conjured. And "conjure" is not too strong a word. Their power seemed magical, unfolding with the logic of dreams. Like an illusionist pulling wonders from a hat, a trunk, a handkerchief, Kieslowski worked his magic with ordinary stuff, plumbing the everyday-always human wrestle with the possibilities of fate, freedom, faith, love, and especially God.
Kieslowski was already dead and gone before he became well-known in the United States. Only his last four films, done feverishly between 1990 and 1994, were released in the United States, and then only in artsy places. And, not least for dumb bureaucratic reasons, they did not have an easy time of it. Until Three Colors: Red (1994), his last picture, the Academy Awards excluded his work because of their odd national origin (Polish but filmed in France and Switzerland). What many critics regard as Kieslowski's masterwork, The Decalogue (1988), a Polish television series on the Ten Commandments, was finally commercially released here just last year. Prior to that one had to be lucky enough to get tickets for rare showings at big-city art venues. Now, though, The Decalogue and his Three Colors trilogy (1993-94) are wonderfully available in pristine splendor on DVD editions stuffed with all sorts of extra goodies like audio commentaries, interviews, and even "cinema lessons" by the master himself. At last, alleluia, everyone can join the party. Which makes this a good time to revisit the life and work of a filmmaker who doesn't fit any of the fashionable generalizations about the movies these days.
Kieslowski's career began with brief, slice-of-life political documentaries, after a go at firefighter school, from which he dropped out, and training at the prestigious Lodz Film Academy, from which he graduated in 1969. By 1973 he had moved to writing and directing television fiction features that meshed the political and existential. His first commercial feature, Scar (1973), examined the conflict between political good intentions and obdurate human nature. Camera Buff (1979) tells of a young man who buys a camera simply to record the coming of his child, and to disastrous consequence, the device soon takes over his life. Blind Chance (1982) begins Kieslowski's lasting preoccupation with chance and choice. Young medical student Witek misses a train, a common enough occurrence, but from there Kieslowski details three radically different futures that spin from this seemingly innocuous event.
Happily, Kieslowski's life then took its own decisive turn when he met lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who thereafter coauthored all the screenplays. Their first collaboration, No End (1985), tracked a widow whose dead activist lawyer husband quite literally haunts her as she mourns and tries to dispose of his unfinished cases, particularly the plight of a Solidarity organizer. The two Krzysztofs were rather taken aback when Poland's major institutions—the Church, Solidarity, and the government—all condemned the film. It was Piesiewicz who suggested, half in jest, that they should play it safe (and recoup their reputation) by doing the Ten Commandments.
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