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Krzysztof Kieslowski (Polish School of Documentary Movies) PAL, Region 2.

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Other titles of Polish School of Documentary Movie Series available at Amazon:

Andrzej Munk
Black Series (Czarna Seria)
Kazimierz Karabasz
Krystyna Gryczelowska / Danuta Halladin / Irena Kamienska
Marcel Lozinski
Maciej J. Drygas
Marek Piwowski
Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz
Wojciech Wiszniewski

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Krzysztof Kieslowski - director of documentary and feature films, screenwriter. Born in 1941 in Warsaw; passed away there in 1996.

In 1962 Krzysztof Kieslowski graduated from a technical theatre college and went on to work at the Teatr Wspolczesny (Contemporary Theatre) in Warsaw, where he was a dressing room attendant for such celebrities of the Polish stage as Tadeusz Lomnicki, Aleksander Bardini and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. He went on to study at and graduate from the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz in 1968, and he received his directing degree from this institution in 1970.

While in Lodz, Kieslowski studied with Kazimierz Karabasz and Jerzy Bossak and it was under their guidance that he created his first documentary student films (URZAD / THE OFFICE, Z MIASTA LODZI / FROM THE CITY OF LODZ). He made his first short feature (TRAMWAJ / THE TRAM) under the eye of Wanda Jakubowska. He debuted professionally with a television documentary titled ZDJECIE / THE PHOTOGRAPH, and after graduating from film school, he was affiliated with the Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio) in Warsaw until 1983, for which he made documentary films almost exclusively. Throughout these years, however, he clearly sought to scale down his documentary film production in favor of feature films. In 1973 he made his first narrative film, the made-for-television feature PRZEJSCIE PODZIEMNE / THE UNDERGROUND PASSAGE. In 1974 he became a member of the TOR (TRACK) Film Studio, which was initially headed by Stanislaw Rozewicz before Krzysztof Zanussi assumed the helm.

In 1985 Kieslowski began to collaborate on screenplays with renowned Warsaw attorney Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Their first joint project was the film BEZ KONCA / NO END, which marked the beginning of a long-time collaboration that would see them work together on all of the films Kieslowski would direct afterwards. KROTKI FILM O ZABIJANIU / A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING and KROTKI FILM O MILOSCI / A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), two films in the DEKALOG / DECALOGUE series, brought Kieslowski international recognition. In 1991 (PODWOJNE ZYCIE WERONIKI / THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONICA) Kieslowski began making his films as Polish-French co-productions, and from 1993 all his films were collaborative efforts with the renowned French producer Marin Karmitz. After completing the TRZY KOLORY / THREE COLORS trilogy (1993-94), Kieslowski announced that he was abandoning the filmmaking profession. During the last months of his life, he worked with Piesiewicz on a screenplay for a triptych consisting of works titled RAJ / PARADISE, CZYSCIEC / PURGATORY and PIEKLO / HELL.

Between 1978 and 1981, Krzysztof Kieslowski served as vice chairman of the Stowarzyszenie Filmowcow Polskich (Association of Polish Filmmakers). He also spent some time teaching at film schools located in West Berlin, Helsinki, Lodz, Katowice and in Switzerland.

During his lifetime, Krzysztof Kieslowski won numerous awards for his work as a maker of documentary and feature films, among them a Grand Prix at the INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL in Mannheim for PERSONEL / PERSONNEL (1975), a Gold Medal at the Moscow International Film Festival for AMATOR / CAMERA BUFF, the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival for TRZY KOLORY: NIEBIESKI / THREE COLORS: BLUE and the Silver Bear at the INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL in Berlin for TRZY KOLORY: BIALY / THREE COLORS: WHITE. In 1976 he received the "Drozdze" / "Yeast" Award of "Polityka" weekly, and in 1985 Kieslowski received a lifetime achievement award at the 15. LUBUSKIE LATO FILMOWE / 15TH LUBUSKIE FILM SUMMER in Lagow. In 1990 the director became an honorary member of the British Film Institute for his "outstanding contributions to the culture of the moving image," and in 1993 he received the Order of Literature and Art of the Minister of Culture of France. In 1994 Kieslowski was awarded the Danish C.J. Soning Award for his contribution to the development of film art and European culture, and that same year he was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of TRZY KOLORY: CZERWONY / THREE COLORS: RED. In 1995 he became a member of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kieslowski received the European Media Award (Girona) in 1996 and was a winner of the Felix Award of the European Film Academy. The Department of Radio and Television at the University of Silesia in Katowice was named after him in the year 2000.
"This is a name familiar to all of cultured Europe (...). His films have won distinction at the world's most prominent festivals - from Cannes to Venice, Berlin, Chicago (...) from Strasbourg to New York, Hong Kong and Jerusalem,"
wrote Stanislaw Zawislinski ('Kieslowski. Bez konca' / 'Kieslowski - No End,' Warsaw, 1994) just two years before the passing of Krzysztof Kieslowski, a director whose films have been seen and admired by millions around the world.

Krzysztof Kieslowski was an exceptional individual in Polish narrative and documentary cinema. He was someone who cleared the way for others, who was neither afraid to ask difficult questions nor the most fundamental and universal of questions. Zawislinski believes that humans were already Kieslowski's primary subject of interest when he embarked on his career as a filmmaker.
"Man clashing with society, with power, with the System, with his environment, with his family and with himself. Man entangled in contradictions, dependencies and conflicts. Man constantly forced to make choices in a world of established values and bearing responsibility for those choices. Man encroached upon by politics and man beyond politics. Man facing the inevitable and eternal effort towards freedom, equality and just, eternally seeking love, joy and understanding..."
Finally, man who asks himself and others (just as the director does) one fundamental question: "How should one live?"

This question is present throughout Kieslowski's oeuvre, be it in his documentary or narrative films, though at first glance there seems to be a vast chasm between his documentaries and the films of the THREE COLORS series or even his middle period features like PERSONNEL, CAMERA BUFF, SPOKOJ / THE CALM or BLIZNA / THE SCAR, which were considered examples of the cinema of moral anxiety.

Krzysztof Kieslowski, known widely as a director of narrative features, was for many years predominantly a maker of documentaries. He seemed to remain a documentary filmmaker even when he began directing feature films, and he persisted in this stance up through the production of NO END. It is difficult to agree with Mikolaj Jazdon, the author of a monograph devoted to Kieslowski's documentary cinema ("Dokumenty Kieslowskiego" / "Kieslowski's Documentaries," Poznan, 2002), who claims that this aspect of the director's oeuvre was never granted the esteem it deserved. It is impossible of course for a documentary filmmaker to compete with a director of feature films, but among documentary filmmakers Kieslowski was truly considered a leading light, especially in Poland.
"The artistic and box office successes of 'Decalogue,' 'The Double Life of Veronica' and 'Three Colors,' eclipsed Kieslowski's achievements as a documentary filmmaker. Those who remember 'The Tram,' his first student film, might even insist that the director was destined to make features from the beginning. In fact, this short, soundless film, which tells the story of a meeting between a boy and girl gone awry, contains so much of what would ultimately interest the director about reality, life and coincidence. These same interests also characterized his work as a documentary filmmaker..." wrote Boguslaw Zmudzinski in a catalogue that accompanied the retrospective of Kieslowski's films organized during the 33rd International Festival of Short Films in Krakow in 1996.
In this same publication, Marek Hendrykowski wrote,
"Documentaries were Krzysztof Kieslowski's first great love. Today, when his worldwide successes as a director of feature films have obscured his documentaries, eclipsed them, we somehow forget how significantly the documentary film years preceding this success shaped Kieslowski's artistic identity and how much the his features owe to his experience as a documentary filmmaker."
Mikolaj Jazdon goes even further in his analysis, finding the last stages of Kieslowski's oeuvre equally colored by his experiences with documentary filmmaking, though one might think that by this time the documentary way of examining reality would have been lacking entirely from his work. Nevertheless, the years 1966-80 were for Kieslowski very much the years of documentary filmmaking. In these twelve years he produced more than a dozen documentary films that featured collective heroes (THE OFFICE, FABRYKA / THE FACTORY, FROM THE CITY OF LODZ, SZPITAL / THE HOSPITAL, ROBOTNICY '71 - NIC O NAS BEZ NAS / WORKERS 1971 - NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US) and individual protagonists (MURARZ / THE BRICKLAYER, ZYCIORYS / CURRICULUM VITAE, Z PUNKTU WIDZENIA NOCNEGO PORTIERA / A NIGHT PORTER'S POINT OF VIEW, PIERWSZA MILOSC / FIRST LOVE or SIEDEM KOBIET W ROZNYM WIEKU / SEVEN WOMEN OF VARIOUS AGES). Some of these works reassessed propagandistic theses or views broadly disseminated in the Polish People's Republic. These include BYLEM ZOLNIERZEM / I WAS A SOLDIER, which presents World War II as perceived by soldiers who had lost their eyesight during the conflict, and WORKERS 1971, a portrait of those who began to speak in their own voices after the workers' protests of December 1970. Many of these films, and perhaps most, explored social, economic and political realities in the Polish People's Republic. This group includes the training film CURRICULUM VITAE, produced as an education tool for Communist Party activists, and the dramatic tale of the former managing director of the "Renifer" (Reindeer) company titled NIE WIEM / I DON'T KNOW. The latter group also includes the metaphor of totalitarian rule titled A NIGHT PORTER'S POINT OF VIEW and GADAJACE GLOWY / TALKING HEADS, a borderline film that is thought to span into yet another group of Kieslowski's documentaries. These in turn are characterized by a strong existential aspect and include SEVEN WOMEN OF DIFFERENT AGES and, to a certain extent, FIRST LOVE.

Kieslowski began making narrative features alongside documentaries around the time of his television debut, THE UNDERGROUND PASSAGE. His feature films of this period were almost documentaries themselves, and around this time his documentary projects began to include such forms as the staged documentary (CURRICULUM VITAE) or documentaries that were simultaneously narrative features, as A NIGHT PORTER'S POINT OF VIEW was with its hero seemingly playing... himself.

In an interview with Stanislaw Zawislinski, Kieslowski said,
"Everyone wants to change the world whenever they make the effort to do something. I don't think I ever believed the world could be changed in the literal sense of the phrase. I thought the world could be described."
As Mikolaj Jazdon notes, this view matches the hypotheses formulated by Julian Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski in their famous 1974 book SWIAT NIEPRZEDSTAWIONY / THE NON-REPRESENTED WORLD. As the authors of this book recommended that writers do, Kieslowski showed reality through the prism of micro-worlds, places that were seemingly normal, that we encounter in our everyday lives. These took the form of a social security office (THE OFFICE), a tractor factory (THE FACTORY), a funeral home (REFREN / REFRAIN), a hospital (THE HOSPITAL) and a train station (DWORZEC / THE RAILWAY STATION). Kieslowski believed, as Jazdon wrote,
"that this description, like an image reflected in a drop of water, would contain within itself a universal picture of contemporary Polish reality."
In the process, he attempted to penetrate the hidden mechanisms that governed the system's operation. He proved consistent in this penetration, pursuing it in his student film THE OFFICE, as well as in films like THE FACTORY, PRZED RAJDEM / BEFORE THE RALLY, WORKERS 1971 and A NIGHT PORTER'S POINT OF VIEW. It is also evident in those of his films in which he presented the stories of private individuals. FIRST LOVE is one such example, telling the story of the love between two very young people, but simultaneously exploring the Poland that the protagonists had to face at the time.

This creative stance was characteristic of a group of documentary filmmakers who were noticed at the festival of documentary and short films in Krakow in 1971. Thus, it is a stance shared by Kieslowski and a number of other filmmakers, including Wojciech Wiszniewski, Tomasz Zygadlo and Pawel Kedzierski. All of these artists attempted if not to change, then at least to show a true picture of life in the Polish People's Republic. As Kieslowski himself said ("O sobie" / "About Myself," Krakow 1997),
"Official utterances described the Communist world (...) as it was supposed to look, not as it looked in truth."
Politics was also present in the works of these filmmakers, which distinguished their films from those of the so-called "Karabasz school." This was in spite of the fact that Kieslowski saw Karabasz as one of his masters, considering his MUZYKANCI / THE MUSICIANS one of the most outstanding achievements in world cinema.

However, Kieslowski was not consistent in his opposition to the "Karabasz school." This becomes evident when we look at FIRST LOVE or one of the director's last documentary films like SEVEN WOMEN OF DIFFERENT AGES, about which Tadeusz Lubelski wrote ("Kontrapunkt" - Magazyn Kulturalny "Tygodnika Powszechnego" / "Counterpoint" - Cultural Magazine of "Popular Weekly," 3/2000) that they creatively developed the formula of the "Karabasz school."

At the time of their release, these films were considered near manifestoes of distrust toward the Communist system. Some were referred to as agitprop films (THE FACTORY), while others were labeled excessively dogmatic in their presentation of views or characterized by the "talking heads" formula of television. It is worth underling, however, that Kieslowski did not so much want to fight those in power, as
"to work towards reducing the distance between people and government, (...) rather than increasing this distance," as Tadeusz Sobolewski wrote ("Kino Krzysztofa Kieslowskiego" / "The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski," ed. Tadeusz Lubelski, Krakow 1997).
His protagonists, in both his documentaries and in those features considered part of the cinema of moral anxiety, do not fight the system. Rather, like the factory director of his feature THE SCAR, the former factory director of his documentary I DON'T KNOW, the protagonist of the documentary THE BRICKLAYER or the doctors in the documentary THE HOSPITAL, they simply want to do a good job. This desire to do a good job clashes with a system that does not like that sort of working. Kieslowski's protagonists thus constantly engage in battle over the simplest things (THE HOSPITAL, BEFORE THE RALLY) and either prove capable of realizing their passions or are destroyed in the process of pursuing them (CURRICULUM VITAE, I DON'T KNOW). The desire to settle down to a peaceful life in some niche (the feature THE CALM, the documentary FIRST LOVE) proves just as difficult to realize. Kieslowski's protagonists are forced to take sides (PERSONNEL, I DON'T KNOW, CAMERA BUFF) and to make difficult political and life choices.

It is noteworthy that in the case of both his documentaries and those features that are part of the cinema of moral anxiety, the protagonists are similar, the issues are similar and finally the penetrating descriptions of the social and political realities of the Polish People's Republic are similar. We might also add what Kieslowski noted in an interview with S. Zawislinski, that both in features and documentaries, he and his colleagues attempted to "observe the world reflected in a drop of water." Thus, the story told in PERSONNEL, which was the first of Kieslowski's television features to be warmly received by both critics and viewers, is "the story of a theatre that was designed (...) in reality to tell viewers about Poland." Krzysztof Kieslowski made only one other documentary after 1980 (SEVEN DAYS OF THE WEEK). His abandonment of the documentary form was in some way required by the situation of artists in the Polish People's Republic, as artists were not only restricted in their production possibilities but were also unsure if authorities would not use their films or footage for purposes other than those intended by them. Yet this departure from the documentary was also caused by the limitations that characterize documentary filmmaking in general. At some point, Kieslowski stated that it was difficult in a documentary to show, say, love, though he himself had attempted this (FIRST LOVE). The director also noted the danger that derived from a documentary filmmaker invading the lives of his protagonists.

Nevertheless, virtually all of his films until NO END give us the impression that we are watching documentaries. His need to refer to concrete, known and believable realities, as Malgorzata Dipont wrote of PERSONNEL (in: "Kieslowski - No End"), the presence of non-professional actors, real places and protagonists playing themselves (like Krzysztof Zanussi did in CAMERA BUFF), were all characteristics of Kieslowski's documentary stance, evident in his feature films of this period.
"In spite of his efforts to perfect his skills and expand his means of artistic expression, none of his films is set 'everywhere,' in other words 'nowhere,' each has identifiable features that signal a specific place and time," wrote Dipont.
PRZYPADEK / BLIND CHANCE, similar both to PERSONNEL and to CAMERA BUFF, as well as to THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONICA, proved a breakthrough. The film was firmly set in Polish realities just before the socio-political transitions of August 1980, yet simultaneously, as Alain Masson stated ("Positif," 12/1988, in: "Kieslowski - No End"), it was reminiscent of a structurally clear philosophical tale.

This structural clarity proved an unusually important feature of Kieslowski's films. Miroslaw Przylipiak ("Kwartalnik Filmowy" / "Film Quarterly," 23/1998) wrote that Kieslowski based the dramatic narrations of his documentary films on the development of a thought. Like other documentary filmmakers,
"he understood the documentary as lying in opposition to feature film, which was nothing unusual," wrote Przylipiak.
The unusual thing was that unlike others he did not base his narrations on oppositions like narrative-reality or fiction-truth, but upon the opposition of narrative to thought.
"Documentary films differed from features in that their composition was discursive, based on the development of a thought, idea or the author's message," noted Przylipiak.
Kieslowski himself spoke of this with Kazimierz Karabasz (K. Karabasz, "Bez fikcji - z notatek filmowego dokumentalisty" / "No Fiction - From the Notes of a Documentary Filmmaker," Warsaw 1985), giving the examples of A NIGHT PORTER'S POINT OF VIEW, where the impulse was to tell the story of a growing inner intolerance, and THE HOSPITAL. Though the latter was read as a great metaphor of the Polish People's Republic, with its shortages, its absurdities and its people who overcome the strangest barriers to achieve something in the face of adversity, Kieslowski had intended to make a film about human fraternity, and only then did he go in search of an object capable of exemplifying this phenomenon. The consequences of adopting this attitude in film proved colossal.

Although the director viewed documentaries as opposed to feature films, the method of building narratives described above is especially noticeable in his last feature films (DECALOGUE, THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONICA, THREE COLORS). These differ from his documentary films and his earlier features in that they lack specific cultural, political or social detail. Time and place are stipulated concepts, even if they are not difficult to identify. Yet counter to their author's contention, and far better than in his documentaries where the substance of life put up resistance and did not succumb easily nor in its entirety to authorial intention, it is these films that best reveal structures based on the development of a thought. In his last films, Krzysztof Kieslowski freed himself of external limitations and gained the ability to follow through on ideas like a scientist in a laboratory.

NO END was an artistic failure, also to its author's mind. Yet there is no doubt that this film influenced the choice that Kieslowski made about the films he would make in the future. This was the first film on which Kieslowski collaborated with attorney Krzysztof Piesiewicz on the screenplay. In his autobiographical book "About Myself," Kieslowski called the film "a breakdown," having in mind the non-cohesive linking of its various threads: the moral, the persuasive and the metaphysical - the latter represented by the figure of the spirit. Having analyzed this failure, the director radically changed not so much his thinking about the world, as the artistic means he chose to use.
"Every film," he wrote, "is in some sense a trap. You want to tell a specific, a real story, but at the same time a story that would be somewhat different. Now I strive to avoid these traps. I try to extract myself from them, and I think there should be one clear line that should drive things. 'Decalogue' was a good exercise in this. The films in the series were short, and as a result this line could be clearly identified, delineated."
As he put it, Kieslowski developed a desire to tell "simple stories," stories that were clear, logically constructed and bore no marks of struggling against the elemental force that is reality.

Standing at a kind of crossroads, Kieslowski could have chosen differently; he could just as well have elected to become Poland's Ken Loach, whose work had so fascinated him at one time.

Yet he decided to embark on a different path. Beginning with DECALOGUE, he began to strip his films of the trappings of reality, simplifying them to the bare minimum and simultaneously increasing the density of his images. He resorted to means of expression differing from any he had used before and thus developed the film language that allowed him to conquer Europe. At the same time, however, he lost part of the Polish audience that had been faithful to him until then, an audience that was surely not persuaded by what he wrote in his autobiography:
"I betrayed nothing of myself in 'Veronica,' 'Three Colors,' 'Decalogue' or 'No End.' I think instead that I enriched my portrayals of people with that entire sphere of feelings, intuitions, dreams and superstitions that constitute the inner life of every human being."
This disparity in the reception of his films, deriving from the different viewpoints of Polish and Western viewers, seems more significant in Kieslowski's case than in that of any other filmmaker.

The DECALOGUE series seems to be set in Polish realities. Each film takes place in what appears to a typical, gray, gloomy, Communist-era Polish housing development. Though the average western viewer might perceive these settings as very realistic, to Polish viewers they seemed excessively abstract, lacking the features of everyday life, the daily details that make this up. But this is content which was certainly within Kieslowski's reach given his skills as a documentary filmmaker.
"I attempted to show individuals in difficult situations. All the contextual social difficulties, or difficulties of everyday life, remained somewhere in the background,"
wrote the director of DECALOGUE ("O sobie" / "About Myself"), simultaneously admitting to simplifying the image of daily life in Poland in the 1980s.

In films like PERSONNEL, THE CALM, CAMERA BUFF or BLIND CHANCE, the realities that were the setting for the films' action, i.e. the so-called "second level," were important. This layer rendered the world presented on screen synonymous with reality, and thus it was easy to forge links between the films' protagonists and viewers. Simultaneously, one can indeed say that all these films showed "individuals in difficult situations."

So in DECALOGUE Kieslowski did not so much resort to new subject matter, as he did modify his film language and consciously reach for a set of different formal solutions. In his autobiography, he wrote the following of himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz:
"We intuitively began to suspect that 'Decalogue' could consist of a set of universal films. So we decided to throw politics out of the series entirely."
This idea proved very successful to the Kieslowski-Piesiewicz team. After the extraordinary international success of A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING (with its universal message), the remaining films of the DECALOGUE series - which sometimes referenced the Ten Commandments only very loosely - met with a tremendous response, especially in the West.

Kieslowski's subsequent films, THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONICA and the films in the THREE COLORS series (all of which were produced in France), concerned the sphere of human emotions almost exclusively.
"Along with a radical break with what Krzysztof Kieslowski calls 'politics,' but which should probably be perceived as something much broader, the director's films (except 'Three Colors: White') lose the ground under their feet and are not anchored in a specific reality. The beginnings of this process are already evident in the 'Decalogue' films, whose poetic heroines are the epitome of excessive sensitivity and emotionality, moving about in a void, seeming to float above the ground. (...) His mentally precarious heroines live inauthentic lives, in a reduced reality," wrote Maria Kornatowska ("The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski").
Like those of the DECALOGUE series, his later films feature simple stories about complex human feelings. They are similar to the DECALOGUE films but simultaneously very different. Maria Kornatowska notes that with THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONICA, Kieslowski began paying close attention to visual aesthetics, carefully selecting the dominant hues of his imagery, filming his heroines differently, highlighting and adding to their beauty through photography that was akin to that characteristic of advertising. These measures ultimately proved the source of the new style of his films. In a sketch that appears in the same volume as Kornatowska's text, prominent Polish film critic Alicja Helman also notes how Kieslowski's camera treated the Polish heroines of the DECALOGUE series differently from their French successors in his subsequent films.

Universalism seemed to "consume" reality in Kieslowski's films, but this hardly means that with DECALOGUE the director ceased drawing on his documentary experiences. Quite the contrary, without said experiences, Kieslowski would not have been able to build such superbly detailed filmic structures.

Rafal Marszalek is indubitably correct when he notes that without Kieslowski's documentary skills, he would never have created A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING. In discussing the shockingly detailed scene of the criminal's execution, the critic reminds readers that the use of detail there was similar to that in the film THE HOSPITAL ("The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski").

In her analysis of the films of the DECALOGUE series, French scholar Veronique Campan ("The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski") also reflects on features characterizing Kieslowski's construction of filmed images that point to a relation with documentary film.
"Kieslowski," writes Campan, "is clearly a director who describes; his camera follows his protagonists closely, recording their minutest gestures, even the least significant among them. His cinema might be defined as contemplative seeing as the phases that are preparatory and introduce the mood are more numerous and longer than the actual action phases."
Campan also notes the precision and accumulation of detail that do not recreate off-screen reality in these films, instead serving one sole purpose - the building of emotion. Slow camera movements that lead viewers' eyes from object to object, shots in which minute details draw the viewers' gaze (a rag tossed into a bucket in the fifth film of the series, a fly on the edge of a glass in the second film) and other formal measures are calculated to draw attention to the objects which Kieslowski has invested with symbolic meaning. This is also the purpose of his frequent close-ups and atypical camera angles.

Detail, which appears frequently in both the DECALOGUE and later films, thus plays an important role in conveying filmic information, but it serves a different purpose than merely that of building reality. Writing about one of the films in the THREE COLORS triptych, the previously cited Malgorzata Kornatowska notes:
"Reality in 'Three Colors: Red' is replaced by intense visuals, the deep, living, pulsating fabric of the images."
In Kornatowska's opinion, this visual intensity is composed of various props, objects, gestures and people encountered by the protagonists - all of which the turns in harbingers of something.
"They often carry mysterious, magical meaning; they enable links to be drawn between events and characters. Crystal balls, magic rings that can cast a spell on reality, a necklace of glistening and chiming glass beads, dolls... A plethora of the most normal items."
This penchant for using signs is equally evident in Kieslowski's other films of this period. Kornatowska perceives this last stage of Kieslowski's oeuvre as the director's effort to join in the "fashionable, world, pop-metaphysical current." And she is hardly alone in holding this view.

Kieslowski was a controversial director. This is something that even such a great enthusiast of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema as Stanislaw Zawislinski readily admits, writing in the previously cited book:
"What delights some about Kieslowski's current cinema annoys and repulses others. What appears to some to be fresh, innovative, wise, moving, penetrating, to others seems 'counterfeit,' 'metaphysical gibberish,' 'professional mystification.'"

(bio courtesy of Ewa Nawoj and Jan Strekowski and Adam Mickiewicz Institute)