Kieślowski

Hey there busy Thursday! How about an olive-fried egg, spinach in garlic, and a banana/almond smoothie for a late breakfast? Last night’s green goddess salad dressing on the side. For dressing recipe (and you do want to try it, it is so good) look here.

In the spring of 1990, Swedish Television showed ten short films by a then unknown Polish film director by the name of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films, collectively known as the Decalogue, were shown late in the evenings, and I sat up by myself and watched. Breathless. I had never seen anything like it before. Each film was about an hour long, and took place in a drab, gray area of Warsaw. Actually the movies themselves were sort of gray. Nobody said much. And yet, these films, the characters in each one of them, moved me. To me, each of these ten films was a miracle

The next day I’d rush to my university lecture and very excitedly ask whomever I met:

“Did you see that little Polish film last night? Did you see it?”

Nobody ever had. None of my fellow students, and none of my professors. Soon I didn’t ask anymore. But I continued watching the films. Kieślowski and his Decalogue became a private, haunting love.

One evening shortly afterwards, there was some film award ceremony, also on TV, and I was sort of watching it while simultaneously doing something else. And suddenly I heard the name Kieślowski being called out, so of course I sat down and there he was, this guy who directed those films. I didn’t know what he looked like; I had never seen him before. He was a bit gray, a grayish, tall, thin man with huge glasses. He was presented with an award for his Decalogue films and he said something funny, he said:
“I hope Poland is considered a part of Europe.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say in 1990, only a year after the Berlin wall had fallen and Europe was beginning to open up and there was hope in the air everywhere you looked. It made me very curious of Poland. Kieślowski made me curious of Poland.

In just a few years, Kieślowski became very famous. Not only in Europe, but all over the world.

Life brought me back to the States, and soon I found myself working for a movie star in New York. It was a job I did reluctantly, and my heart was never really in it. Anyway, I traveled with her from one location spot to the next, and suddenly we were in Austin, Texas, and I don’t know how it happened but one day, on the table in the hotel, she’d left a script and on that script there was a name I recognized: Zbigniew Preisner. I recognized that name from the Decalogue movies, because Zbigniew Preisner had composed all the music to them. A wave of nostalgia came over me, a feeling of “I should not be here, I should be there”. A little later, I asked the movie star about the script but she told me she’d forgotten it at the hair salon. And shortly after that, I left her.

When I moved to Poland I could say three words in Polish: “kwiat” (flower), “list” (letter), and “herbata” (tea). Polish is a difficult language to learn, especially for a Swede with the linguistic background I had (English, German, French). But I arrived with an open heart and found a Warsaw not unlike the one I had seen in Kieślowski’s films. It was a beautiful time for Poland, because the country was coming into its own somehow after years of oppression, and things were happening very fast. It was also a beautiful time, I imagine, for Kieślowski, who by then was making movies in France. Great movies. I saw all three of his Three Colors Trilogy (films themed on the ideas of the French Revolution: Liberty, equality, and fraternity) in movie theaters in Poland: Cracow (Blue), Lublin (White), and Warsaw (Red).

I recently watched an interview on YouTube with Kieślowski, in which he says that although censorship was something bad, it made filmmakers in Eastern Europe clever at discovering possibilities that their western colleagues never were forced to discover. Filming, he explained, became a game, a game where you’d have to balance at the edge of what was allowed. I think this may be one of the reasons his movies are so intriguing. Someone, a critic, said Kieślowski made movies about the soul more convincingly than anyone else. I agree with that.

After Kieślowski died (of a heart attack in 1996), my interest in films waned. I rarely go to the movies these days. American films in particular, with their perfect, beautiful, but boring actors and their glazed Disney endings, leave my heart cold. As do most European films. I miss the films of Kieślowski.