Krzysztof Kieslowski

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Gadajace glowy AKA Talking Heads (1980)

    1971-1980DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

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    a description:
    It is 1979. Krzysztof Kieslowski runs a sort of sociological poll. Seventy-nine Poles, aged seven to 100, answer three questions: When were you born? What are you? What would you like most? They want similar values: freedom, justice, democracy. We watch people thinking honestly, “latching on to something Good”, as one of the persons in the film says. From those registered on tape, Kieslowski chooses 44 people and puts them in chronological order: from a one-year-old who can’t speak yet, to a 100-year-old woman who can’t hear the question, but repeats several times that she’d like to live longer. He shows a whole gallery of talking heads – kids, pupils from primary and secondary schools, students, a full-time activist with a youth organization, an engineer on the threshold of his professional career, an electrician, a nurse, a priest, a history teacher, a mother of two, a writer, a sociologist, a sculptor, a taxi driver, retired people, a woman who thinks that above all she is Catholic, and a chemical engineer who acknowledges questions with: “these days I drink, everything’s fine.” On the level of image nothing in particular is happening. Simple heads come one after another, under which there is information about the date of birth. Yet this gallery fascinates, for two reasons: the viewer observes how people’s dreams change with age. At the beginning a funny two-year-old boy wants to be car – a Syrenka, and at the end, an almost one-hundred-year-old woman, having recently lost her husband, doesn’t want anything more.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Krótki film o zabijaniu AKA A Short Film About Killing [+Extras] (1988)

    1981-1990DramaKrzysztof KieslowskiPoland

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    (Noel Megahey, DVD Times)

    A Short Film About Killing started out as the fifth episode of Dekalog (Decalogue/The Ten Commandments), a series of ten short films co-written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski for Polish television in 1988. Dekalog 5: Thou Shalt Not Kill when expanded to a feature length film as A Short Film About Killing, loses none of its power and remains one of the most important and intensely powerful episodes from a cycle of films that dealt with many complex issues affecting our daily lives.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Krótki film o milosci aka A Short Film About Love (1988)

    1981-1990DramaKrzysztof KieslowskiPoland

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    Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love is a companion piece not only to the landmark 1988 Dekalog miniseries, from which this expanded version originally came, but also the likewise enriched and deepened A Short Film About Killing. (It’s worth noting here that even if you’ve already seen the segment this film is based on in its original form, side-by-side with the other nine parts, the radically different and far more redemptive ending makes Love worth seeing separately.) Like all the episodes of the Dekalog, it purports to take its inspiration from one of the Ten Commandments, but in practice the segments only deal with a rigid moral law in the most obtuse and poetic way. Love dealt with the sixth commandment (against fornication), but the story of Tomek, a late-teen voyeur obsessed with Magda, a voluptuous and sexually mature woman living in an apartment across the courtyard from him, is far less brusque than its textual antecedent would indicate (though Kieslowski’s viewpoint certainly stresses a strain of auteurist omniscience and acumen).Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Bylem zolnierzem AKA I Was a Soldier (1970)

    1961-1970DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

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    a description by one of IMdB members:
    A group of veterans recount a horrifying experience when trapped in a minefield, resulting in each losing their sight.

    This is an incredibly powerful anti-war film, showing the horrors of war first hand, in stark close-ups without gratuitous gore. The physical injuries are not quite so emphasized as much as the emotional scaring, with the soldiers expressing their deep regret and longing for a better quality of life.

    The film is edited in such a way that story becomes one detailed account, with each character providing his piece of the story. Their collective suffering seems akin to witnessing an AA meeting, except that this group wish to make it clear to the world that they were victims of misguided patriotism, with no control over their fate.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Przeswietlenie AKA X-Ray (1974)

    Documentary1971-1980Krzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

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    a description by one of IMdB members:
    With X-Ray I feel Kieslowski beginning to repeat himself. While his investigations of collective decision making at the workplace are superficially similar, he is mining deeper and deeper at a particular face exposing certain anomalies in Democratic Centralism. Here he collects the stories of men in a tubercular sanitarium which repeats, to a lesser effect, the methodology of Bylem zolnierzem (I Was a Soldier) (1970). After everyone has told their story, and are seen in a long shot sitting on a terrace attended by a very pretty nurse, Kieslowski delivers the punchline- a bus descends into a nearby town whose factories fill the valley with smoke containing who knows what health destroying toxins. Its all as simple as one, two, three.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Refren AKA Refrain (1972)

    1971-1980DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    a description by one of IMdB members:

    Though this film illustrates how death has been reduced to ‘The Numbers’ it is implied at the end that both life and death have been reduced to the numbers. This film is uniquely shot from the point-of-view of the bureaucrats whose job it is to deregistrant the living to give their survivors permission to buy things like graves, coffins etc. The first image is of tearing out the pictures from identity books. It seems to be some weirdly arcane quasi-religious ritual whose purpose is at once obvious and inexplicable.

    The frisson of this film is having the usual bureaucratic rigmarole, petty rules and arbitrary specifications implemented by some not so very terrible people, come up against people at their most vulnerable and emotional condition. These people have just had a loved one die and they are being dealt with by the book, by the numbers.

    Background music, when its heard, is a harpsichord concerto.Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Z miasta Lodzi AKA From the City of Lodz (1968)

    1961-1970DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

    Quote:
    Kieslowski’s thesis film from the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz. A portrait of the city of Lodz. Images of buildings that are falling apart are accompanied by optimistic commentary about the city and its industries. @culture.plRead More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Pierwsza milosc AKA First Love (1974)

    1971-1980DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPoland

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    a description by one of IMdB members:
    A pretty 17 year old girl is told she’s pregnant by a doctor who also says that she is not a candidate, for some unexplained reason, for an abortion. Instead she is going to marry her boyfriend. The boyfriend, 20, is going to get an exemption from the draft for this. Someone say ‘silver lining’?Read More »

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski – Z punktu widzenia nocnego portiera AKA From a Night Porter’s Point of View (1978)

    1971-1980DocumentaryKrzysztof KieslowskiPolandShort Film

    Quote:
    Portrait of factory watchman Marian Osuch, who turns out to be a fanatic of discipline wanting to control everything and everyone. A metaphorical image of totalitarianism. @culture.plRead More »

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