KIESLOWSKI’S INESCAPABLE MORAL HORIZONS

Thomas Hibbs
Baylor University

Toward the end of the film Red, the last in the Three Colors trilogy from Krzystzof
Kieslowski, the main character, Valentine, states, “I feel something important is
happening around me.” Many of the films of the acclaimed Polish director, who died in
1996, feature characters who experience the growing realization that, as the philosopher
Charles Taylor puts it in his defense of the perspective of the ordinary human agent,
“something incomparably important is involved” in their deliberations and choices.
Although Kieslowski never explicitly affirms a particular answer to the sort of questions
his characters formulate, he does depict characters as caught up in, and groping
tentatively to articulate, what Taylor calls “inescapable moral horizons.”

As is clear from his most famous films—The Double Life of Veronique, Three Colors
trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and The Decalogue, a series of ten one-hour films
produced for Polish TV—Kieslowski is preoccupied with issues of chance, fate,
alternative possibilities, and the tentative suggestions of a providential design to the arc
of human life. Indeed, Kieslowski is quickly acquiring a reputation as the most
philosophical filmmaker since Ingmar Bergmann, whom Kieslowski greatly admired.

Kieslowski specializes in the depiction of characters who suffer a sort of dislocation, a

loss or orientation, or deprivation of identity. In the Decalogue he sought to describe
ordinary, everyday life, a world populated by people who do not “know why they are
living,” who suddenly realize that “they’re going round and round in circles…not
achieving what they want.” Yet, the realization of entrapment often allows Kieslowski’s
characters to begin to reflect on the purpose of their lives and to consider alternative
paths. Kieslowski frankly admits that his films are about the big philosophical questions,
“What is right and wrong?…. What is honesty and dishonesty?” In probing possible
rejoinders to these questions, Kieslowski avoids the simplistic extremes of pat answers or
easy skepticism. There is a kind of moral realism operative in his films, akin to that
espoused by philosophers like Charles Taylor, who proposes that we treat our “deepest
moral instincts” as legitimate modes of access to “ontological claims.” Kieslowski
asserted that the Three Colors films were about “people who have an intuition or
sensibility.”

The recent release on DVD of some of the films from the middle period in Kieslowski’s
career (Scar, Camera Buff, Blind Chance, and No End) allows viewers to see how
pervasive are certain themes in Kieslowski’s films. The summer has also witnessed the
publication of two comprehensive studies of Kieslowski’s films: The Films of Krzystof
Kieslowski: The Liminal Image by Joseph Kickasola and The Cinema of Krzystof
Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance by Marek Haltof. Both Kickasola and
Haltof see the newly released set of films as transitional, combining elements from his
first documentary-style films with elements from his later, more mature and more
philosophical speculations on fate, chance, and the human quest for love and meaning, on
what another Kieslowski commentator, Annette Insdorf, identifies as Double Lives,
Second Chances.

These films exhibit a Kieslowski in transition in another and deeper sense, which Joseph
Kickasola identifies as a “shift from the outside world to the inner world,” from the
attempt at simple description to metaphysical speculation. Documentary has its limits;
“not everything can be described,” as Kieswlowski himself put it. Turning a camera on
external events cannot capture “intimate experiences” of “making love” or “dying.”

Of the four newly released films, Scar (1976) is the earliest and, by Kieslowski’s own
accounting, the weakest, a film that is closest in form to the preceding documentaries and
most focused on the frustrations of the political order in Poland. By contrast, the next
film in this group, Camera Buff (1979), contains a number of themes that will preoccupy
Kieslowski for the remainder of his career. It begins with the hauntingly cruel image of a
hawk preying upon a pigeon, an image we soon realize is from a dream of a pregnant
woman, Irka. The film shifts rather rapidly to the happy setting of a celebration of the
birth of Irka’s daughter, whose father, Filip, has purchased a new camera on which to
record his daughter’s life. At the party, Filip’s boss congratulates him on his happy life.
Soon Filip is filming everything, irritating his wife, who snaps at him for filming the
child he should be raising, “If she fell off the balcony, would you film that, too?” The
original title of the film, Amateur, fits the central plot-line, as Filip is quickly enlisted by
his boss to record their company’s 25th anniversary, the result of which earns a 3rd place
prize in an amateur film competition. His new avocation consumes Filip, distancing him
from his family, whom he now treats merely as instruments or objects of his art. Filip
confesses to his wife, “I need something more, something more important than peace and
quiet.” Irka asks, “What?” and he responds, “I don’t know what, but it may be more
important.” In a wonderfully symbolic scene, Filip frames her with his fingers in the
shape of a camera as she walks out of the room and out of his life. The film ends with
Filip alone, turning the camera on himself and retelling the story of his daughter’s birth.

In many ways, this “breakthrough film,” as Haltof calls it, sets the dramatic conditions
and tone for the films in the period: isolation, despair and longing for what cannot now
be recovered. It can also be seen as laying out the oppositions that Kieslowski’s mature
films will attempt to reconcile, between observation of life and engaged living and
between ordinary life and a sense of some larger context or framework of meaning. The
early films mostly illustrate the decisive and tragic frustration of the aspirations of the
main characters.

Nowhere is frustration more palpable than in two very fine films from this period, No
End (1985) and Blind Chance (produced in 1981 but not released until 1987), the most
bleak films in Kieslowski’s entire career. No End, which Haltof describes as a meditation
on the “impossibility of overcoming the past,” portrays a woman’s (Ulla) failed struggle
with loss and grief after the death of her husband, Antek. Even the presence of her child
cannot console or motivate her. In a desperate attempt to reconnect with the world, she
engages in random sex with a young man she barely knows. During this encounter, she
experiences no pleasure; her body writhes, her face contorts, and her eyes remain
constantly averted from his. No scene in Kieslowski better illustrates Kickasola’s claim
that for Kieslowski sex is always “more a matter of spiritual need and desire than a
biological function.” Immediately after this encounter, she speaks in the frankest terms
of confession: “My husband died 31 days ago. I had everything. There were days I hated
him. I didn’t realize how happy I was then.” Herself a translator, Ulla speaks these words
in Polish to a lover who understands not a word. Her sexual liaison has the feel of what
Dostoevsky calls “laceration,” a turning of violence inward against the self; her situation
anticipates in many ways that of the widowed and embittered Julie in Blue, especially the
scene where Julie, as she departs her family home in an attempt to leave her past behind
her, scrapes her knuckles against a stone wall, inflicting arbitrary pain upon herself.

No End was, according to Kieslowski, “terribly received” in Poland. Its sub-plot

concerning the trial of an accused Solidarity member, was seen as despairing of any hope
for political reform. Others in Catholic Poland were offended by the film’s depiction of
the suicide of the main character, but this misses the point of the suicide, which
Kieslowski describes as a result of “total defeat.” Indeed, the entire film is framed by the
gloom of the undead. It opens with the ghost of the dead husband, Antek, facing the
audience directly and informing us of his own death. The reunion of Ulla and Antek at
the end is hardly uplifting, especially since Ulla’s suicide itself is portrayed in a dreary
and forlorn tone. In complete silence, Ulla tapes her mouth shut, an apt symbolic
representation of her utter isolation, and sits quietly in front of an open oven.

In many ways, Blind Chance seems to be more of the same, with the horror of loss now
elevated to an iconic Munch-like open-mouthed scream with which the film begins, a
scream that we realize at the conclusion of the film marks the death of the character
Witek in a plane crash. But, with its three stories in one and its accent on the themes of
chance and destiny, Blind Chance anticipates the multiple narrative scheme and the
speculative metaphysics of the mature films.

Each of the three stories begins with Witek running to try to make a train and ends with
Witek considering a flight to Paris. In the first, Witek becomes involved with the
communist party; in the second, he strives to adopt the Catholic faith; in the third, he
remains aloof from deep political or religious commitments, gets married after a
coincidental meeting with a former friend, and begins a family. The last story, in which
Witek seems to achieve an ordinary happiness akin to that enjoyed by Filip in Camera
Buff, is the only one which culminates with Witek getting on the doomed plane. What is
novel in this film is the second story, which is (with the possible exception of Decalogue
I) about as close as Kieslowski ever comes to having a character explicitly affirm
religious life. At one point, Witek comes upon a woman whose home has just been
ransacked by young thugs. When he asks about her ill fortune, she counters that Witek’s
arrival was itself a gift; she adds that the best we can do for others is to give them the
hope that at the moment of death they will not be alone. The segment’s fairly profound
theology of the gift of communion culminates with Witek’s prayer to God: “ I ask for
nothing; only that you be.”

One of the great virtues of Kickasola’s Liminal Image is the seriousness with which it
takes Kieslowski’s own seriousness about the possibility of transcendence. In response
to some critics who see the experimentation with non-linear narrative and the elusiveness
of the quest for meaning as signs of post-modern skepticism, Kickasola counters that
Kieslowski does not “divide the Immanent and the Transcendent so neatly.” Instead, he
often entertains the possibility that the “the temporal may intersect with the spiritual
through mystery.” Indeed, the points of possible intersection are multiple and arise from
a variety of sources, from the perception of the possibility of redemptive suffering, of
mercy in the face of evil, and from glimpses of a providential design to overlapping
narratives. As Kieslowski himself put it in an interview,

I think there is a point at which all these trifling matters, all

these little mysteries, come together like droplets of
mercury to form a larger question about the meaning of
life, about our presence here, what in fact went before and
what will come after, where there is someone who controls
all this, or whether it all depends on our own reason or on
someone or something else. The mystery is there all the
time.

With the exception of the second storyline in Blind Chance, itself engulfed within a
narrative of arbitrary destruction, the early films end in failure. Still, they depict
characters’ striving to locate their lives in the context of some larger framework of
meaning or purpose. Furthermore, Kieslowski deploys numerous symbolic and dramatic
devices to engender in the viewing audience sympathy with the main characters; thus
does Kieslowski enhance our experience of the endings as tragic, an experience that
presumes that viewers retain a longing for something other and better than the fate of the
main characters. Kieslwoski’s own experimentation in Blind Chance with multiple
possible arcs to a single human life suggests the possibility of multiple, incompatible
endings, not all of which need be characterized by abnegation and despair.

From these films forward, Kieslowski offers increasingly rich dramas of the quest,
featuring characters enveloped by an inescapable moral framework. To repeat the phrase
from Valentine in Blue, “something important is happening around me” (italics mine).
Especially in the films from the trilogy, Kieslowski’s characters move, however
tentatively, in the direction of a realization of their role in a drama larger than their
individual lives. In this way, Kieslowski’s films overlap with philosophical themes
central to the project of Charles Taylor, who takes his cue from the common, ordinary
experience of moral agents who often have the sense that there may well be something
important to discover about the point and purpose of their lives, that the framework in
which they find themselves embedded, while open to possible reconsideration, even
thorough alteration, is not an arbitrary construct. “One orients oneself in a space that
exists independently of one’s success or failure in finding one’s bearings, which,
moreover, makes the task of finding these bearings inescapable.”

Such is the experience of many of Kieslowski’s characters in Decalogue and Three

Colors, particularly that of Julie in Blue, the first film in the trilogy based on the modern
French and Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Instead of a simple
celebration of liberty, Kieslowski’s film puts into question its meaning and value, its
compatibility with a rich sense of identity and love. Having lost both her husband and
daughter in a car accident, Julie is, as Kieslowski notes, “completely free”; she has no
family, no intimate friendships, no responsibilities, and possesses surplus wealth and
time. In her fine commentary track on the DVD version of the film, Annette Insdorf
suggests that the film is an inquiry into the viability of freedom from the constituting
conditions of a character’s identity.

The understanding of freedom in purely negative terms results in a horrifying vacancy.

To be “free from all frameworks,” Taylor writes, is to be in the grips of an “appalling
identity crisis.” There is an intimate connection between “identity and a kind of
orientation” in moral space, as Taylor likes to put it. This is precisely the point of
Kieslowski’s abstract use of color and sound in Blue. At crucial junctures in Julie’s
return to the community of the living, not only is the color blue prominent but also the
strains of an unfinished symphony on which her husband was working at the time of his
death. In a mysterious and deeply symbolic scene, Julie leaves a café to confront a street
musician who is playing portions of the unpublished and unfinished symphony.

The scene suggests a rich overlapping and interlacing of lives, not by mere chance but
because each life has potential access to realms of reality that transcend and encompass
individual lives. The depiction of convergent stories and parallel destinies is evident in
Kieslowksi’s willingness to repeat certain themes in different stories and to introduce
characters from one story into another, most evident in the finale of the trilogy. In Red’s
concluding scene of rescued survivors from a boat wreck. The survivors include
characters not only from Red but also from previous stories in the trilogy. The pairing of
the characters as they emerge from the rescue boat suggests a unification of characters
previously hostile or unknown to one another.

In his films, Kieslowski raises all sorts of philosophical puzzles, but he does so less
through explicit dialogue than through complex artistry—the silent framing of what
initially appear to be isolated objects, the visually imageless presentation of sound, the
tendency toward abstraction in the use of colors and objects, and the subtle interweaving
of lives and plots. In multiple ways, Kieslowski’s films enhance our appreciation of
moral and metaphysical phenomena in ways philosophical argument cannot. Again
Taylor,

Moral argument and exploration go on only within a world

shaped by our deepest moral responses… If you want to
discriminate more finely what it is about human beings that
makes them worthy of respect, you have to call to mind
what it is to feel the claim of human suffering, or what is
repugnant about injustice, or the awe you feel at the fact of
human life. No argument can take someone from a neutral
stance towards the world…to insight into moral ontology.