Oscar Movies: Red–Director Kieślowski, Writer Piesiewicz, Composer

A graduate of Poland’s prestigious Łódź film school—whose alumni also include Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Wajda—Krzysztof Kieślowski began his career as a filmmaker after a childhood spent moving from city to city, a flirtation with the theater, a drawn-out attempt to avoid military service, and two rejections from his future alma mater. Appropriately, his early works are varied, on-the-ground documentary shorts that explore corners of everyday life normally ignored by state-approved cinema: factory work, the effects of industry on urban existence, medical care, military conscription, and even funerals.

As his work became increasingly political—Workers ’71, a film about striking laborers, was censored by the Polish government—Kieślowski moved away from documentary and toward narrative filmmaking, first with the hybrid and then with a trio of features (Personel, The Scar, and The Calm) that blend a focus on labor and class with keen insight into the ethical quandaries of life under Communism.

His fourth-released feature, Camera Buff—about a factory worker turned obsessed filmmaker—screened to acclaim at the Moscow and Berlin  Film Festivals but would be recognized as a major work only in hindsight. Another exploration of labor, Short Working Day, was followed by Blind Chance,

a work that found Kieślowski pursuing grander themes of fate and spirituality.

Consisting of three variations on the simple premise of a man trying to catch a train, Blind Chance announced a new chapter in Kieślowski’s career, even though its suppression by the government meant that it was not widely seen until six years after its completion.

No End solidified Kieślowski’s new approach and introduced him to two collaborators with whom he would continue to work until the end of his life: the lawyer turned screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner.

In 1988, the trio embarked on the ambitious Dekalog project, completing ten hour-long films for television and two feature-length theatrical versions of films five and six (A Short Film About Killing, A Short Film About Love) that announced the filmmaker to a global audience.

Building on that success, Kieślowski was able to turn next to European investors for The Double Life of Veronique, which won three awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.

Expanding on the themes of fate and chance that he’d explored in Blind Chance and the concept of interlocking narratives that he’d pursued in Dekalog, Kieślowski created the masterful Three Colors trilogy, then announced his retirement from filmmaking.

Kieślowski died from medical complications after a heart attack in 1996, at the young age of 54, leaving behind a thirty-year body of work and several masterpieces of world cinema.

Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s career as a screenwriter began, much like the way events unfold for a character in a Krzysztof Kieślowski film, with a fateful encounter. While working as a private-practice lawyer with a focus on defending critics of the Communist

government and members of the Solidarity trade union, Piesiewicz was approached by Kieślowski to serve as an adviser on a planned documentary about the televised trials being conducted under martial law in Poland (1981–83). Though filming began on that

project, it was soon abandoned after Kieślowski realized that his presence as a filmmaker was affecting the cases being documented. In its place, Kieślowski and Piesiewicz began to collaborate on a narrative film about martial law, which became No End. Though Piesiewicz returned to law, the two remained friends and worked together three years later on Dekalog, after Piesiewicz suggested the Ten Commandments as a subject to Kieślowski. Over the next six years, Piesiewicz balanced a career as a politician (having been elected to the Polish Senate in 1991) with his efforts as a screenwriter, working with Kieślowski on all the director’s

subsequent features: The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colors trilogy. Piesiewicz has continued writing screenplays since Kieślowski’s death, including those for Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, a trilogy the two had conceived just before the director’s passing.

A self-trained musician, Zbigniew Preisner began performing at the famous arts-cabaret Piwnica pod Baranami in Krakow while still in college. His debut as a film composer was in 1981 with Antoni Krauze’s Weather Forecast.

After composing several scores for film and television, he came to the attention of Krysztof Kieślowski, who met him at the infamous dive bar Lotos in Warsaw, where they discussed the concept that would turn into No End.

After No End, Preisner and Kieślowski would work together on sixteen more films before Kieślowski’s death in 1996. They enjoyed an intimate collaboration, with Preisner beginning his work in the earliest phases of preproduction.

Their last collaboration was Three Colors: Red, for which Preisner won the César for best score from the French Film Academy.

Preisner has scored many other international feature films, including Héctor Babenco’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Louis Malle’s Damage, Luis Mandoki’s When a Man Loves a Woman, Agnieszka Holland’s The Secret Garden, and Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love.

He continues to tour and compose music outside the realm of film. Requiem for My Friend, Preisner’s first large-scale work written for recording and live performance, is dedicated to Kieślowski’s memory.