Krzysztof Kieslowski
Polish film maker (1941-96)
"Taken from the forthcoming Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, to be published by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, in May 2000"
Kieslowski was a director and scriptwriter of documentaries and feature films. He achieved world-wide renown in the last ten years of his life mainly for his ambitious linked projects, Decalogue (1987-8) and Three Colours (1993-4), which - perhaps unusually for a major Polish artist - focused on the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of human experience, rather than on Polish sociopolitical realities.
Kieslowski, like Wajda, Polanski, Zanussi and Skolimowski, was a product of the famous Lódz Film School, from which he graduated in 1969. As for many other artists of his generation, the student protests of March 1968 and the workers' riots of December 1970 proved to be crucial defining experiences. Whilst Kieslowski would eschew directly political messages in his work, the totalitarian character of the political system meant that the political invariably pervaded his films.
He began his career by making documentaries, which would later influence his approach to feature films. As early as the Cracow Film Festival of Short Films in 1971, he and several other young documentary film makers, calling themselves the "Cracow Group", had issued a manifesto calling for the exploitation of documentary techniques in feature films, which has been described as a dominant trait of the "Cinema of Moral Anxiety".
Kieslowski's verité technique echoed certain concerns of the so-called "New Wave" of Polish poetry in the early 1970s, in presenting the unadorned realities of daily life in direct contradiction to officially propagated images of unalloyed progress. Like such writers as Stanislaw Baranczak and Adam Zagajewski, Kieslowski focused on the "unrepresented world" (as the title of the famous 1974 "New Wave" manifesto had it) of everyday social reality. His first major documentary, Workers '71 (1971) showed what provincial workers really thought about the changes ushered in by the new Gierek régime in contrast to the pieties of official discourse. Despite cuts made by Kieslowski and co-director Tomasz Zygadlo, the film did not receive a screening until the advent of Solidarity.
Opposition, however, did not interest Kieslowski. As he stated (Stok, 1993, p. 60), "my point of view in no way precludes trying to understand the other side", a stance unusual in a often radically polarised society. Thus, in the pseudo-documentary Curriculum Vitae (1975), he could examine objectively the mechanisms of Party organisation, as a Party Control board convened to consider the expulsion of a member. His documentaries often resulted in their subjects' self-compromise, as occurred with the celebrated From the Night Porter's Point of View (1978), whose protagonist readily espoused unadulterated anti-libertarian views on a variety of topics. The political authorities shelved the film until 1979 and then granted it only a very limited distribution (as unannounced support to an obscure Oriental film).
The authorities well appreciated the wider implications of showing even minor authoritarians in action, but sometimes tolerated the game in which audience and film-maker were engaged. As Kieslowski explained in a censored discussion from September 1975, this game was based on 'the eternal system of allusions practised by everyone, [and] "a wink and a nod"' (Czarna Ksiega PRL. Tom 2, p. 334). For their part, censors attempted to disable such inferences, particularly in reviews which suggested that such films indicated a more general crisis in Polish society. This sense of crisis informed the works of the "Cinema of Moral Anxiety" (1975-1981).
With his 1975 film, The Staff Kieslowski was seen as initiating this trend. The tale of a theatre production, in which a young man is disabused of his idealistic notions concerning art, served as a metaphor of the disjuncture between experience and official propaganda in 1970s' Poland. Calm (1976) cut even closer to the bone by showing politically unacceptable realia - the theft of materials by management and the use of prisoners for public construction projects in direct contravention of international agreements - and duly received a five-year ban. In Camera Buff (1979), the hero shared Kieslowski's dilemmas as documentary film maker, in being not only censored by his factory boss for whom he is making a film, but forced to realize the dangers of his own position - that of potential unwitting instrument of repression.
Kieslowski's non-engaged stance led him into difficulties on several occasions and even to being called a "traitor". Part of the reason lay in his oft-expressed curiosity about the nature of ideological choices and the overwhelming sense that human beings are frequently trapped in impossible situations that are not entirely of their own devising.
Blind Chance (1981) amply illustrated this point. In three separate narratives an individual rushes to catch a train - with very different consequences in each case: he joins the Party, Solidarity or, finally, remains uncommitted. He preserves his integrity but suffers injustice when he becomes politically involved. The distinct narratives thus reinforce the point that human beings are not reducible to ideological schemes or political choices. This was highly provocative in Poland after Solidarity. The film did not see general release until the more liberal climes of 1986.
Unable to work under Martial Law, Kieslowski eventually received permission to record proceedings during the trials of Solidarity activists. He discovered that the presence of his film crew usually led to more lenient or, indeed, no sentences being passed, since judges were reluctant to have their declarations recorded for posterity. The régime subsequently attempted to use his films as proof of its goodwill in its struggle against the opposition and to recruit the director to its cause. It offered Kieslowski his own film production house, an offer which he declined, but its manipulations led to his temporary ostracism by fellow artists.
His next feature, No End (1984), reflected some of these experiences and managed to offend all political persuasions. Events are seen from the perspective of a young idealistic pro-Solidarity lawyer who dies at the beginning of the film, leaving his distraught wife to carry on the struggle and look after their young son. The worker he has been defending is freed as a result of negotiations between the authorities and the pragmatic defence counsel who takes over the case. Finally, his wife commits suicide, joining him in death.
This ending, implying an abdication of her responsibility towards the son, together with the sex scenes, proved unacceptable to the Church. Oppositionists disliked the pessimistic implication that neither they nor the authorities had triumphed, whilst the Party's leading daily savaged the film as "anti-socialist sabotage", hating its focus on the underground opposition and terming it "an instruction manual for oppositionists". These charges were echoed in the Soviet press. The film was not released for six months and was then restricted to obscure venues, yet proved very popular with the general public.
Kieslowski took a fairly equanimous view of film censorship. His strategy was to distract the censor's attention from the most crucial scenes by shooting deliberately unacceptable scenes that would be cut immediately. For him, the censored version represented the "director's cut" since he had voluntarily agreed to those compromises. From his experience with the later foreign co-productions, Kieslowski could pronounce authoritively on the economic censorship prevalent in Western film production, which he saw as far more restrictive of the film-maker's liberties. In this sense, Kieslowski gives the lie to the notion that film censorship in Poland was necessarily onerous; instead, as he remarked, "we were truly important in Poland - precisely because of censorship".
Further Reading
Krzysztof Kieslowski Homepage: www.personal.engin.umich.edu:80/~zbigniew/ Kieslowski/kieslowski.html
Matuszak, Remigiusz Wlast, "Film", in (ed Pirie, Donald, Jekaterina Young & Christopher Carrell) Polish Realities. The Arts in Poland 1980-1989, pp. 62-73. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1990
(ed) McDonald, Kevin & Mark Cousins, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998
Sobolewski, Tadeusz, 'Spokój i bunt. Uwagi o twórczosci Krzysztofa Kieslowskiego' in (ed Nurczynska-Fidelska, Ewelina) Kino polskie w dziesieciu sekwencjach, Lódz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lódzkiego, 1996, pp. 103-114
(ed) Stok, Danusia, Kieslowski on Kieslowski, London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993
'The Subversive Eye', Index on Censorship, 1995, 6.
J M Bates, 13 April, 1999