Last night I finally watched Red. I'd seen Blue and white weeks previous...but the tracking on Red was all messed up so I couldn't watch it. Last night I watched it twice. Definately my favorite of that trilogy. So now I seen the decalogue (a masterwork) and blue, white, and red, and tykwer's adaptation of Heaven. Red has affected me most of all, and I can't stop thinking about it today. I wonder where to go next with this guy. I heard the Double Life of Veronique is supposed to be excellent, and at this point I can't see not liking any of his work.
In my opinion, Red is not just a masterpiece, it closes the circle on what is practically an artistic miracle in itself. That's because it's the key part of a work that has that rare power to - as you say - affect the way a viewer thinks about the world. It did so for me, anyway - not so much that it put new ideas in my head, but it clarified and elucidated things that perhaps I had felt about the significance of little events, coincidence, chance, and fate....I have been told by some Polish friends that to grasp this is to understand something of the so-called 'Polish Mentality'. Whatever it is, it's important to me. If you like this aspect of Kieslowski, I bet you'd like some other Polish artists/writers like Wislawa Szymborska and Tadeusz Konwicki (two of my favorites). I put this link up in the foreign films thread pre-hack, but I don't know if you caught it before, so here it is again: http://michaelkoch.net/trois.html It's not my essay, just something I published in a short-lived ezine a few years ago; I think it's really thought-provoking nonetheless. 'The Double Life of Veronique', made a few years before the Three Colours trilogy, features a younger and no less beautiful Irene Jacob; to this day I'm amazed that this Swiss girl pulled off a double role that included portraying the Polish Weronika in Polish. It's even less of a film about plot or action than the trilogy, if that's possible. Instead it's all about emotion, intuition, and those mysterious connections between people that seemed to fascinate Kieslowski. Two books I'd recommend: Kieslowski on Kieslowski: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_1/103-5661501-5995046?v=glance&s=books Co-written by the subject shortly before the trilogy came out. I've on my third copy of this book, having lent it out a few times and never gotten it back. It's pretty brilliant, often funny, brutally frank (especially about his views of Poland and Polish people) yet enigmatic: is he really serious in saying that moviemaking isn't worth the bother, and if he had known that when young he never would have started? An essential book. Double Lives, Second Chances: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t..._books_1/103-5661501-5995046?v=glance&s=books Just came out last year. Another book worth checking out. I asked for the Decalogue on DVD for Christmas, but they had to order it - the local mall superstore didn't have it - surprise, surprise. If you can find any of the films from the early 80's like 'No End', 'Camera Buff' or 'Blind Chance', then you're a better searcher than I. I'm guessing that most, if not all of his films made during his career as documentary filmmaker in the 1970s are neither translated into English nor available here in the US. One more film that I've found, and am ordering as I type this: 'Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-so'...a documentary that came out a few years ago, and is supposed to also be very good (I missed it when it played in NYC) http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/vid/krzysz.html "At this moment, in this cafe, we're sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go their own way. And then, they'll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time." ''At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see Veronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Veronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it. These are the best viewers. There aren't many of them but perhaps there are a few.'
Michael, Thanks a ton. I am printing out that essay right now to read this evening. I will definately check out the rest of the links also. The essay itslef looks incredibly interesting. I saw that quote about the cafe on the rotten tomatoes site in someone's review. Excellent stuff. It really makes sense in the light of seeing Red.
Red is, by far the best of the three. that's not to say the other two are bad. Blue grows on you, and actually improves in thinking back on the film. White is the least interesting but still very good. I like Veronique the best, probably the purest exposition of his work that I've seen. Those first images of the absolutely riveting Irene Jacob (at nineteen years old) singing as the rain arrives in mid-note ..... beautiful.
So how did your drunken diatribe sound? Can you remember any of it? Andif so, could you post it here?
By the Way Michael, that essay was outstanding. Now I feel the need two watch those three over again with some of the thoughts from that essay stuck with me. And I tried to order Double Lives, Second Chances from Borders, we'll see if it comes.
I love the Blue, White, and Red trilogy. I wish they would release them on DVD. Unfortunately they're only on VHS. I guees I'll have to give the Double Life a second chance. I remember hating it when I watched it.
Umm four...let me think...A Short Film About Killing? The one with the longest murder scene in movie history (at the time, anyway)? I'm too tired to look it up or remember.
"I prefer the rugged humanism of Kiarostami to the designer mysticism of Kieslowski." -Jean-Luc Godard
Yeah- that neat little trick he has of convincing viewers that over-manufactured coincidences are some kind of proof of religious manifestation.
Funny, I watched that one last New Year's Eve/Day at 3 am with a couple friends at their place, all completely sh/tfaced. Yes, it is a bit unsettling like that. As for Godard, to each his own I guess. I'm certainly no expert, but I'd say Kieslowski is less about 'designer mysticism', and more about a sort of actual, endemic belief in these quasi-supernatural forces of fate and coincidence - which, if we're going to paint with a really broad brush here, we could label with literary terms like 'Slavic fatalism'. Or, to use a really ineffable term, it's an aspect of 'the Polish mentality'; this last concept fascinates me because it's pretty much impossible for someone who's not Polish (like me) to define it exactly - but I've been assured by Polish people I know that such a thing does really exist, if only on the plane of cultural ideas. I've even been told by some that to see and understand Kieslowski's films is to understand something of this particular worldview. Now I don't know if that's true, but if Kieslowski is guilty of this kind of 'designer mysticism' (and I think that's pretty unfair, myself) then you might as well go all the way back to Mickiewicz and the beginnings of modern (read: romantic, individualistic, rather spiritual) Polish culture, and accuse quite a few of its leading lights since that time of the same. Go read Wislawa Szyborska, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago (and whose poems are said to have inspired Kieslowski's work); or go read the short stories of a relatively little known writer (one of my recent favorites, though) named Pawel Huelle - to name but two off the top of my head. You will recognize something like that so-called 'designer mysticism', as Godard called it. Whatever. I've always thought of Kieslowski as both humane and humanist.
No, Kieslowski's not allowed to use a bunch of high-paid French movie starlets to portray an obscure Polish concept that nobody else can understand. And he's yanking my chain if he claims to be doing so. There's nothing exclusively Polish about Tres Colours. It has more to do with French surrealist cinema of the 1930's (or a Ted Turner-colorized version of).
Ah, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were his first choice. After all, Andie MacDowell was his first choice for The Double Life Of Veronique (and Nanni Moretti was supposed to play the male lead). His 'obscure Polish concepts' are no harder to understand than Godard's 'obscure French concepts' - it all depends on who's doing the understanding, doesn't it? And all interpretations of his movies are mine own (and those of people I've talked to) - unfortunately we can't ask the man what he was getting at now, and I don't think he'd be so loquacious anyway.
man, i hate andie macdowell. that's all i can say right now..i have to get back to the decalogues. 4 more hours of viewing to go.
just watched 7 and 8... seven is about majka (sp?), young woman trying to take her daughter, ania, away from her mother (the girl's grandmother). either is about the young jewish girl who returns to poland to find her would-be savior from the war. kieslowski amazes me in his ability to pull you so far into these stories, with only 45-50 minutes of film. there's no wasted breath, no wasted scene. tonight, as with every other film, i'm left only wanting the story to continue.
Rouge is one of my all-time favorite movies. Although I saw it for the first time in Palm Springs and the theatre was filled with (surprise!) old people. Now, I love my elderly brethren, don't get me wrong. But going to see a movie with subtitles when you are either severely losing your hearing or needing a new bifocal prescription is not the world's best idea...Luckily the movie was so good, I was able to ignore the many "What did he just say?" and "Who is that again?" moments!
finished the decalogues last night. who knew stamps could overtake someone's life? the adultery one exhausted me......i did laugh a few times,. whenever the glove compartment door would fall down (another example of how everything[\B] is deliberate......i continue to doubt the possibility of my forgiveness upon any act of adultery. i actually cried for a good hour thinking about this one as i tried to fall asleep. good note: i just bought the trilogy on dvd. bad note: not one single video store in this city has double life of veronique.