WHO is he?
Polish scenarist and film director who made over 40 short and feature
length films in a 30-year career spanning the 1960s and the 1990s.
Kieslowski made short documentaries about Polish social reality — a
phase that would influence his subsequent filmmaking starkly — before
moving on to feature-length fiction. The first part of his Three Colours
trilogy, Blue (1993), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Kieslowski turned away from social realism and political specificity of
his earlier works to a more abstract, personal brand of cinema that
emphasises the interconnectedness of people and the idea that people
separated by geography or social status could be thinking about or
having the same experience at the same moment. Chance, coincidence and
fate are recurring constructs. His films, especially the 10-part Decalogue (1989) that is based on the Ten Commandments, are illustrations of the ways spirituality manifests itself in modern life.
Style
It could be said that Kieslowski’s style falls in line with the general
inclinations of European arthouse cinema, with an emphasis on mise en
scène — the physical elements of a scene — for conveying meaning.
Abundance of close-ups, expressionist use of score, and subjective
cinematography — often handheld — are some of the characteristic
elements of Kieslowski’s aesthetic. His use of glass in his scenes —
glass that breaks, glass that shields, glass that separates, glass that
unites — and enclosed spaces that reflect the psychology of the
characters are also noteworthy.
WHY is he of interest?
Along with Andrej Wajda, Kieslowski remains one of the key figures in
Polish cinema who helped it gain international recognition. The
inventive narrative strategies that he devised in his films with
long-time collaborator and lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz could be seen as
precursors to later-day hyperlink narratives, in which we find the lives
of numerous characters inseparably intertwined.
WHERE to discover him?
Camera Buff (1979) is a story about being in love with images. It
centres on family man Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) and his relationship with his
newly purchased 8mm camera, which he uses to film the world around him.
One of Kieslowski’s earliest and most personal films, Camera Buff
is a paean to both the creative and destructive powers of cinema. It is
both a topical indictment of contemporary Polish bureaucracy and
censorship and a personal statement confessing a change of artistic
direction for Kieslowski.
Courtesy- The Hindu
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