Krzysztof Kieślowski, who started his career as a documentarist, in his mature phase with Dekalog and Tri boje soared to unreachable philosophical and theological abstractions



In his autobiographical confessions (published in Danusija Stok’s book Kieślowski on Kieślowski) the late Polish director Kieślowski expressed, maybe even with too much self-criticism, his dissatisfaction with the directing work he performed in his first feature film The Scar (Blizna, 1976), which was based on an article in the newspaper. However, the interpretation of his film as sort of an inverse social realism is valid. Kieślowski started his career as a documentarist. In his mature phase, he soared to unreachable philosophical and theological abstractions with Dekalog (in the end of 1970s) and the trilogy Three Colors (in 1990s). In the beginning of his career, Kieślowski was interested in digging through the mud of Polish socialist reality, characterized by a bureaucracy that does not care about people’s needs. In this gloomy iconography of “red” designers “in grey”, “the last European moralist” tried to find at least a grain of conscience that would prevent the antihero of his film The Scar to observe his reflection in the window glass peacefully. In the distance, instead of the thick green forest, there emerges a frightening bundle of factory chimneys.


The protagonist of the acclaimed film Camera Buff found himself in a similar situation. In this film, Kieślowski narrowed the narrative focus even further to an individual who finds himself in political manipulations’ grind. This film has a “killer” ending, unique in film history: a film enthusiast and quiet family man, whose films were censored and his family broken, in the end has nothing else to do but to turn his 8 mm camera towards himself and so in a symbolic way commit suicide!


Ten years later we see Warsaw in the fifth part of the TV series Dekalog, A Short Film About Killing, and it already resembles the metaphysical and timeless apocalyptic landscapes in which Kieslowski, using a moralist scale, an artists’ palette of mould green tones, and dramaturgical reduction, establishes a troublesome symmetry between individual sin (killer) and collective sin (death penalty). This was Kieslowski’s answer to God’s fifth commandment: Thou shalt not kill. After the last part of the TV series Dekalog the ethical and artistic vertical trajectory of his opus spread to his later films, Three Colors. In his film testament, Kieslowski leaves us “faith, love and hope”. (Diana Nenadić)