THE international film community was shocked; just over a year ago when the gifted Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, announced his retirement from film making. Nobody who cared about cinema wanted to believe that Kieslowski meant what he said - and then last year came the good news that he was working again, writing the screenplays for a new trilogy dealing with heaven, purgatory and hell. Then, on Wednesday last, another shock; Kieslowski died of a heart attack at the age of 54.
Krzysztof Kieslowski was the pre eminent European director of his generation and one of the greatest film makers in the first century of cinema. But it was not until 1988, when his ambitious and brilliant Dekalog was released, that he began to receive the wide international acclaim he deserved. The four films which followed his haunting The Double Life Of Veronique and the magisterial Three Colours trilogy confirmed his international reputation and he was showered with plaudits from critics and awards at festivals, although the 1994 Cannes jury disgraced themselves when their awards totally ignored Three Colours: Red.
Kieslowski was born in Warsaw on June 27th, 1941, and studied at the Lodz Film School, from where he graduated in 1969. After working on documentaries and on television films he made his cinema debut in 1976 with The Sean, a key film in pre Solidarity Poland. The satirical Camera Buff (1979) explored the role and limits of the artist in Polish society through the story of a factory worker whose obsession with his home movie camera causes him nothing but trouble.
Blind Chance, which followed in 1982 and was suppressed by the authorities for five years, was an imaginative picture of a young medical student's attempt to catch a train, with three different outcomes. Not shown in Poland until 1986, the riveting 1984 No End dealt with a young worker charged with organising a strike.
Based on the 10 Commandments, the Dekalog (1988) was a bleak but powerful collection of 10 short features, two of which were extended into feature films, the startling and deeply unsettling A Short Film About Killing and the cynically titled A Short Film About Love. They were followed by the sensual and moving The Double Life Of Veronique, with Irene Jacob named best actress at Cannes for playing the dual roles of two physically identical young women, one Polish and the other French, who never meet. It was accompanied by a glorious score by Kieslowski's - regular composer, Zbigniew Preissner.
The crowning achievement in Kieslowski's career was Three Colours, his colour-coded trilogy which took as its starting point the three central ideals of the French Revolution - liberty (blue), equality (white) and fraternity (red). The first film, Blue, was set in Paris and featured Juliette Binoche as a woman re inventing her life after the death of her husband and child in an accident. An emotionally charged and moodily introspective film, it was utterly compelling and profoundly moving.
Any preconceptions Blue may have raised about the two subsequent films in the trilogy were soon dismissed by the second film, White, which, after a prologue in Paris, is set in Poland. The central character, Karol, is a Polish hairdresser who never adapted to life in Paris and is being divorced by his French wife. A chance encounter with a fellow Pole leads to Karol returning home inside a suitcase, but it is stolen from the baggage carousel at the airport in Warsaw. Nothing that follows is remotely predictable in this keenly plotted and thoroughly involving satire on Poland's new capitalism.
Kieslowski concluded his trilogy on a very high note with the wise and wonderful Three Colours: Red. Feelings of deja vu have rarely been more pleasurably evoked than in the resonances that pepper this superb successor to Blue and White. The warmest and most optimistic of the trilogy, Red was set and shot in Geneva and reunited Kieslowski with the radiant Irene Jacob, as a student and fashion model who befriends a lonely retired judge played by Jean Louis Trintignant at his melancholy best.
Krzysztof Kieslowski came to Ireland in 1992 as a guest of the Dublin Film Festival, and I was one of many who had the pleasure of meeting him and taking about his work. He was a quiet spoken man who prefaced the conversation by saying that he wanted his films to speak for themselves and that he did not want to discuss their themes in any detail - before going on to talk at length and in depth about many of them. While here he signed a poster of The Double Life of Veronique which is now proudly displayed on the wall of the festival's office.
