FILMMAKERS OF FAITH
Looking for SomethingThe films of Krzyzstof Kieslowski are haunted by spiritual imagery, and yet the Polish director never really found grace—or got past "the God of the Old Testament... who ruthlessly demands obedience." Eric David | posted 11/01/2006 12:00AM
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Krzyzstof Kieslowski, one of Poland's great directors, was reticent to talk about his beliefs.
"Faith is a possibility," said Kieslowski, who died an untimely death at age 54. "In Poland, it is an obligation." In fact, he once told an interviewer that he thought the church in his country actually hindered contact with God.
He told another interviewer, "I am not a non-believer," and yet another, "I think that if someone like a God above exists, someone who made everything around us, and made us too, then we very much slip out of his grasp."
Yet Kieslowski clearly had an interest in the spiritual, religious and metaphysical aspects of his characters, not only in his subject matter, but also in his transcendental style.
Influenced by Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky, Kieslowski's filmmaking is characterized by ambiguity, irony, philosophical discussions, long takes, and close-ups of objects, hands and faces. Yet unlike most European directors, his films are enormously engaging; Kieslowski captivates the attention with suspense, humor and ruthlessly efficient editing.
In his films, though, he was open to questions of faith, while he left room for the "searchers," as he termed himself. "All my films," he said, "are about individuals who can't quite find their bearings, who don't quite know how to live, who don't really know what's right or wrong and are desperately looking."
After a distinguished career in documentary filmmaking as part of the "Cinema of Moral Anxiety" (which also produced directors like Agnieszka Holland and Krzyzstof Zanussi), Kieslowski abandoned the form because he felt afraid of filming "real tears" and felt he could more accurately portray the world and human emotion through actors.
Turning the camera on himselfCamera Buff marks his first major narrative film, and Kieslowski turns camera on himself, as he has said he does in all his films, but in this one most explicitly. The main character, played by Jerzy Stuhr, buys a camera to film his newborn daughter. As he gains notoriety with his filmmaking, he also loses his family and career, even his soul. With nothing left to film, he shoots himself—with the camera—and tells the story of what happened, a redemptive suicide and a confession in one stroke, two themes common in Kieslowski's films.
In the early '80s, he met a lawyer (now a Polish Senator), Krzyzstof Piesiewicz, who was to co-write all the rest of Kieslowski's films. Piesiewicz, who describes himself as a "Christian rather than a Catholic," is still writing, with a film coming out next year, titled Nadzieja, which translates as "Hope."
Kieslowski's next film, No End, analyzes how there is no end to the oppression of the Communist regime (although the Catholic Church also denounced the film), as a woman tries to carry on her dead husband's legal defense of a Solidarity hunger striker. The husband's ghost silently watches her without expression or interference. In the end she kills herself to be with her husband in a "happy ending."
Blind Chance is the first of his "series" films in that it's three films in one. The main character, Witek (Boguslaw Linda), lives out three possible lives depending on if he catches a train or not. In the first story, Witek becomes a Communist, in the second, a resistance worker, and in the third he is apolitical. Kieslowski admitted that the third viewpoint, the apolitical, was closest to his own, while it's in the second story that Kieslowski gives most voice to the religious search, as Witek prays at one point, "I ask only one thing of you: be there." Yet in all three stories, Witek remains an essentially good person. Blind Chance influenced later films in the conditional tense like Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run.
Tackling the Ten
Kieslowski's next project was the monumental Decalogue, a series of ten one-hour films made for television, ostensibly about the Ten Commandments. "I was watching people who didn't really know why they were living," he says. Decalogue is ten stories about people who "suddenly realize that they're going round and round in circles, that they're not achieving what they want."
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