Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Krzysztof Kieslowski Collection ($29.95 each DVD) The late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski is best remembered for the 10-part Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy. The collective power of these late works is awesome, but it's a shame they've so overshadowed the films that came before.

Though his movies ache with longing for a higher order, Kieslowski remained a pained skeptic. So we can't thank the heavens for The Krzysztof Kieslowski Collection, which single-handedly remedies the neglect of his early career. Thanks instead to the French company MK2, who masterminded a similarly thoughtful overhaul of Charlie Chaplin's oeuvre, and to Kino for releasing the six individual DVDs in America.

The immediate draw was the chance to see the expanded theatrical versions of Decalogue's most affecting episodes: A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love. Killing, expanded from Decalogue 5, vastly outstrips the presentation of Facets' Decalogue set, rendering the film's elaborately murky images with marvelous clarity. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak used green filters and modified lenses to give the image an almost palpably soiled look, appropriate to Kieslowski's (literally) darkest tale, whose centerpiece is a brutal murder played out at almost unwatchable length.

The expanded running time allows Kieslowski to further explore the connections between his three central characters: the murderer, his victim and the lawyer who unsuccessfully defends him. But the extra information undercuts some of the short version's purposeful ellipses. In the short version, the lawyer is congratulated on the birth of his first child as he awaits his client's execution, and we realize we've never considered that this man might have a life outside of his job; in the long version, we've already seen him and his wife together, so the revelation is a minor irony rather than a profound shift in perspective. In the short version, the limited vision that allows both murder and capital punishment is extended to the film and its audience, but in the long version, we're privileged to see things the characters don't, which to a certain degree lessens our culpability.

As Kieslowski evolved into a despairing humanist, he became more and more focused on the idea of connection — the fellowship that the fall of communism and a united Europe (a centerpiece of Three Colors) failed to create, and the bonds that form between people without their knowing it. The latter theme is at the center of A Short Film About Love (expanded from Decalogue 6), in which a fragile, orphaned young man spies on a sexually liberated woman in an adjacent apartment building. Here, the additional background only deepens the sense of tragedy. There's a moment, haunting in its sad beauty, when the two of them, he at his telescope, she at her kitchen table, sit down to their evening meals opposite each other, engaging in the same act but utterly divorced from each other. It's at once a critique of the illusory intimacy fostered by cinematic voyeurism and an acknowledgment of the aching need it serves to fill. Restricted to the boy's perspective for its first half, the film flip-flops after their disastrous face-to-face meeting; he disappears from the frame, and she is left agonizing over what has happened to him, not even knowing his last name or how to look for him. Decalogue 6 ends on a despairing note, but A Short Film About Love's ending, added at the insistence of actress Grazyna Szapolowska, moves the story from melodrama to mysticism.

Ranging from 1976 to 1985, the four early films in the collection -- The Scar, Camera Buff, Blind Chance and No End — show Kieslowski moving steadily away from his documentary origins. (Several of Kieslowski's docs are included in the collection; the best are the short, sly "The Office," on No End, and the cutting "A Night Porter's Point of View," on A Short Film About Killing.) The story of a communist official caught between party needs and personal conscience, The Scar is something of a nonstarter, but Camera Buff confronts the same dilemma more productively. Jerzy Stuhr, who recently directed The Big Animal from an unused Kieslowski script, stars as a factory worker who becomes an unexpected filmmaker after he purchases an 8 mm camera to make home movies of his newborn child. The issues Kieslowski faced as a documentary filmmaker in a state-controlled industry come quickly to the fore as Stuhr is drafted by his boss to document an important conference, then scolded for including shots which might cast the factory in a bad light. (Unfortunately, the film, which addresses the issue of seeing more directly than anything in Kieslowski's oeuvre apart from A Short Film About Love, is the only non-letterboxed one in the collection; talk about restricted vision.) Caught up as he is with his protagonists' private drama, Kieslowski constantly puts other, unrelated figures in the frame, as a reminder that life goes on whether the filmmaker captures it or not. At the film's conclusion, Stuhr turns his lens on himself, opening the door to Kieslowski's increasingly personal and introspective approach to the medium.

Blind Chance, finished in 1981 but withheld from release for six years, goes off something of a metaphysical deep end, though its structure was innovative enough to provide inspiration (if that's the word) for Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. In the film's three-part tale, an unassuming medical student's life is transformed by minor variations on the same event: He catches a train, or does not catch it, is arrested for knocking over a policeman in the rush or reconnects with an old love. Whether he becomes a party functionary or an anti-government activist or simply an obedient family man, he's always consumed with the idea of leaving Poland. But when he finally gets his wish in life number three, the results are not what anyone would expect, though they do explain the otherwise cryptic images that open the film. There's no room in Blind Chance's deterministic universe for character or personal choice, which may be why the film feels less fleshed-out, more schematic than some of Kieslowski's others.

No End's story is equally outlandish, but it's anchored by Szapolowska's haunting performance, and Kieslowski again allows his characters to choose, if only among severely restricted options. In the first of Kieslowski's many screenwriting collaborations with former lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Szapolowska plays the wife of a lawyer whose sudden death lands her with the responsibility of finding someone to defend his clients, particularly a man accused of organizing for the growing Solidarity movement. Though her husband occasionally returns from the grave to guide her actions (and begins the film by addressing the camera directly), Szapolowska is often left on her own, trying to reconcile private grief with political obligations. In some ways, No End is a precursor to Blue's story of loss, but individual concerns have yet to supplant social ones; Kieslowski's characters are not yet so isolated that politics is reduced to a pipe dream. The last movie Kieslowski made in Poland before he consciously universalized himself with The Decalogue, No End closes with a bittersweet farewell, a twist on Blind Chance's explosive conclusion. In both, it's as if Kieslowski is saying goodbye, first violently, then with regret. The regret is mutual. Kieslowski's virtues — his patience, his control, his humanism and conscience — are in short supply these days. It's a shame he can't come back from the dead and whisper in a few directors' ears.