Prominent Poles
Krzysztof Kieslowski, film director, screenwriter
Born: June 27, 1941, Warsaw, German occupied Poland (presently Poland)
Died: March 13, 1996, Warsaw, Poland
Early days. Father, Roman, was a civil engineer , mother, Barbara, was a clerk At sixteen, he briefly attended a firemen's training school, but dropped out after three months.
Without any career goals, he then entered in 1957 the College for Theater Technicians in Warsaw because it was run by a relative. He decided to become a theater director, but at the time there was no specific training program for directors, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step. Leaving college in 1962 and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieslowski applied to the £ódŸ Film School and was rejected twice. To avoid compulsory military service during this time, he briefly became an art student, and also went on a drastic diet in an attempt to make himself medically unfit for service. After several months of successfully avoiding the draft, he was accepted in 1964 to the Lodz Film School on his third attempt. He attended the school from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieslowski quickly lost his interest in theater and decided to make documentary films. He and his wife, Maria, had one daughter, Marta.
Documentaries. Kieslowski's early documentaries focused on the everyday lives of city dwellers, workers, and soldiers. Though he was not an overtly political filmmaker, he soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities. His television film Workers '71(Robotnicy ’71), which showed workers discussing the reasons for the mass strikes of 1970, was only shown in a drastically censored form. After Workers '71, he turned his eye on the authorities themselves in Curriculum Vitae, a film that combined documentary footage of Politburo meetings with a fictional story about a man under scrutiny by the officials. Though Kieslowski believed the film's message was anti-authoritarian, he was criticized by his colleagues for cooperating with the government in its production. His documentary First Love (Pierwsza milosc) has won the Golden Dragon Prize at the International Festival of Short Films in Cracow in 1974. Kieslowski later said that he abandoned documentary filmmaking due to two experiences: the censorship of Workers '71, which caused him to doubt whether truth could be told literally under an authoritarian regime, and an incident during the filming of Station (1981) in which some of his footage was nearly used as evidence in a criminal case. He decided that fiction not only allowed more artistic freedom, but could portray everyday life more truthfully. His TV debut was the documentary The Photograph (Fotografia) in 1969. For some time he worked for documentary studios, WFD (Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych). In 1974 he joined the "Tor" film production unit (Zespol Filmowy "Tor"), of which he became a deputy director in 1984.
Polish feature films. His first non-documentary feature, 1975 Personnel (Personel), was made for television and won him first prize at the Mannheim Film Festival. Both Personnel and his next feature, 1976 The Scar(Blizna) which won first prize at the Moscow Film Festival, were works of social realism with large casts: Personnel was about technicians working on a stage production, based on his early college experience, and The Scar showed the upheaval of a small town by a poorly-planned industrial project. These films were shot in a documentary style with many nonprofessional actors; like his earlier films, they portrayed everyday life under the weight of a flawed system, but without overt commentary. Camera Buff (1979) (which won the grand prize at the Moscow International Film Festival) and 1981 Blind Chance (Przypadek) continued along similar lines, but focused more on the ethical choices faced by a single character rather than a community. During this period, Kieslowski was considered part of a loose movement with other Polish directors of the time, including Janusz Kijowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Agnieszka Holland, called the Cinema of Moral Anxiety. His links with these directors (Holland in particular) caused some raised eyebrows within the Polish government, and each of his early films was subjected to censorship and enforced re-shooting/re-editing, if not banned outright (Blind Chance was not released domestically until 1987, almost six years after it was completed).
The 1984 film No End (Bez konca) was perhaps his most clearly political film, depicting political trials in Poland during martial law, from the unusual point of view of a lawyer's ghost and his widow. It was harshly criticized by both the government and dissidents. Starting with No End, Kieslowski's career was closely associated with two regular collaborators, the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner. Piesiewicz was a trial lawyer whom Kieslowski met while researching political trials under martial law for a planned documentary on the subject; Piesiewicz co-wrote the screenplays for all of Kieslowski's subsequent films. Preisner provided the musical score for No End and most of the subsequent films; the score often plays a prominent part in Kieslowski's films and many of Preisner's pieces are referred to within the films themselves. In these cases, they are usually discussed by the films' characters as being the work of the (fictional) Dutch composer van den Budenmayer.
The 1988 The Decalogue (Dekalog), a series of ten short films set in a Warsaw tower block, each nominally based on one of the Ten Commandments, was created for Polish television with funding from West Germany; it is now one of the most critically acclaimed film cycles of all time. Co-written by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz, the ten hour-long episodes had originally been intended for ten different directors, but Kieslowski found himself unable to relinquish control over the project; in the end, each episode featured a different director of photography. Episodes five and six were also filmed in longer feature-length versions, and released internationally as A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love respectively. Kieslowski had also planned to shoot a full-length version of Episode 9 under the title A Short Film About Jealousy, but exhaustion eventually prevented him from making what would have been his thirteenth film in less than a year.
Foreign productions . Kieslowski's last four films were foreign co-productions, made mainly with money from France and in particular from producer Marin Karmitz. These focused on moral and metaphysical issues along similar lines to The Decalogue and Blind Chance but on a more abstract level, with smaller casts, more internal stories, and less interest in communities. Poland appeared in these films mostly through the eyes of European outsiders. The four films were his most commercially successful by some distance. The first of these was La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique) (1990), starring Irene Jacob. The relative commercial success of this film allowed Kieslowski the opportunity to raise the funding for his ambitious final films, the trilogy Three Colors (Blue, White, Red), his most acclaimed works next to The Decalogue and his first international commercial successes.
Death and legacy. Krzysztof Kieslowski died on March 13, 1996 during open-heart surgery following a heart attack, and was interred in Powazki Cemetery, Warsaw, Poland.
Years after his death, he remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works the study of film classes at universities throughout the world. The 1993 book Kieslowski on Kieslowski describes his life and work in his own words, based on interviews by Danusia Stok. He is also the subject of a biographical film, Krzysztof Kieœlowski: I'm So-So (1995), directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki.
Awards, honors. For his films Kieslowski has been awarded numerous awards at the film festivals around the world: in Cracow (1974, 1975, 1977, 1979), in Mannheim (1975), Gdansk (1975, 1976, 1979, 1988), Moscow (1979), Cannes (1988, 1991), Venice (1989, 1993), Berlin (1980, 1994), San Sebastian (1988), Chicago (1980), Lyon (1979), and Sao Paulo (1988). In 1995 he was an Oscar nominee for directing and screenwriting of Red.
Kieslowski has lectured on directing and script writing at the universitites in Katowice (1979-1982), West Berlin (1984), Helsinki (1988) and Switzerland (1985, 1988, 1992).
Kieslowski was a member of the Polish Filmmaker Association; where he was a deputy chairman from 1979 to 1981. In the Fall of 1990 he was awarded a Fellowship of the British Film Institute. He was also a member of the European Film Academy.
Sources:
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Krzysztof Kieslowski" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
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