hibbs - kieslowski's inescapable moral horizons

8/8/2019 Hibbs - Kieslowski's inescapable moral horizons

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KIESLOWSKIS INESCAPABLE MORAL HORIZONSThomas Hibbs

Baylor University

Toward the end of the filmRed, the last in the Three Colors trilogy from Krzystzof

Kieslowski, the main character, Valentine, states, I feel something important ishappening around me. Many of the films of the acclaimed Polish director, who died in1996, 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 questionshis 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 filmsThe Double Life of Veronique, Three Colors

trilogy (Blue, White, andRed), and The Decalogue, a series of ten one-hour films

produced for Polish TVKieslowski 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 theDecalogue he sought to describe

ordinary, everyday life, a world populated by people who do not know why they areliving, who suddenly realize that theyre going round and round in circlesnot

achieving what they want. Yet, the realization of entrapment often allows Kieslowskischaracters 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 possiblerejoinders 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 deepestmoral 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 Kieslowskis

career (Scar, Camera Buff,Blind Chance, andNo End) allows viewers to see how

pervasive are certain themes in Kieslowskis films. The summer has also witnessed thepublication of two comprehensive studies of Kieslowskis films: The Films of KrzystofKieslowski: The Liminal Image by Joseph Kickasola and The Cinema of Krzystof

Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance by Marek Haltof. Both Kickasola andHaltof 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, onwhat another Kieslowski commentator, Annette Insdorf, identifies asDouble Lives,


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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 theattempt at simple description to metaphysical speculation. Documentary has its limits;

not everything can be described, as Kieswlowski himself put it. Turning a camera onexternal events cannot capture intimate experiences of making love or dying.

Of the four newly released films, Scar(1976) is the earliest and, by Kieslowskis 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 nextfilm 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 pregnantwoman, Irka. The film shifts rather rapidly to the happy setting of a celebration of the

birth of Irkas daughter, whose father, Filip, has purchased a new camera on which to

record his daughters life. At the party, Filips 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 companys 25th

anniversary, the result of which earns a 3rd

placeprize 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 andquiet. Irka asks, What? and he responds, I dont know what, but it may be more

important. In a wonderfully symbolic scene, Filip frames her with his fingers in theshape 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 daughters 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 Kieslowskis maturefilms 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) andBlind Chance (produced in 1981 but not released until 1987), the mostbleak films in Kieslowskis entire career. No End, which Haltof describes as a meditation

on the impossibility of overcoming the past, portrays a womans (Ulla) failed struggle

with loss and grief after the death of her husband, Antek. Even the presence of her childcannot 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 remainconstantly averted from his. No scene in Kieslowski better illustrates Kickasolas claim


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that for Kieslowski sex is always more a matter of spiritual need and desire than abiological 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 didnt realize how happy I was then. Herself a translator, Ulla speaks these wordsin 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 situationanticipates in many ways that of the widowed and embittered Julie inBlue, especially thescene 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 Endwas, according to Kieslowski, terribly received in Poland. Its sub-plotconcerning 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 films depiction of

the suicide of the main character, but this misses the point of the suicide, whichKieslowski 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 atthe end is hardly uplifting, especially since Ullas 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 characterWitek 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 thespeculative metaphysics of the mature films.

Each of the three stories begins with Witek running to try to make a train and ends withWitek 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 acoincidental 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 CameraBuff, 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 ofDecalogueI) 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 Witeksarrival 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 segments fairly profound

theology of the gift of communion culminates with Witeks prayer to God: I ask fornothing; only that you be.

One of the great virtues of KickasolasLiminal Image is the seriousness with which ittakes Kieslowskis own seriousness about the possibility of transcendence. In response


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to some critics who see the experimentation with non-linear narrative and the elusivenessof 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 spiritualthrough 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, ofmercy in the face of evil, and from glimpses of a providential design to overlappingnarratives. 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 ofmercury 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 controlsall 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 inBlind 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 ofmeaning 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 thatpresumes that viewers retain a longing for something other and better than the fate of the

main characters. Kieslwoskis own experimentation inBlind Chance with multiplepossible 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 inBlue, something important is happening aroundme (italics mine).Especially in the films from the trilogy, Kieslowskis characters move, however

tentatively, in the direction of a realization of their role in a drama larger than their

individual lives. In this way, Kieslowskis films overlap with philosophical themes

central to the project of Charles Taylor, who takes his cue from the common, ordinaryexperience 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, eventhorough alteration, is not an arbitrary construct. One orients oneself in a space that

exists independently of ones success or failure in finding ones bearings, which,

moreover, makes the task of finding these bearings inescapable.

Such is the experience of many of Kieslowskis characters inDecalogue and ThreeColors, particularly that of Julie inBlue, the first film in the trilogy based on the modernFrench and Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Instead of a simple


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celebration of liberty, Kieslowskis film puts into question its meaning and value, itscompatibility 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 andtime. 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 constitutingconditions of a characters 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 oforientation in moral space, as Taylor likes to put it. This is precisely the point of

Kieslowskis abstract use of color and sound inBlue. At crucial junctures in Julies

return to the community of the living, not only is the color blue prominent but also thestrains 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 caf 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 inKieslowksis 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. InReds

concluding scene of rescued survivors from a boat wreck. The survivors includecharacters not only fromRedbut also from previous stories in the trilogy. The pairing of

the characters as they emerge from the rescue boat suggests a unification of characterspreviously hostile or unknown to one another.

In his films, Kieslowski raises all sorts of philosophical puzzles, but he does so lessthrough explicit dialogue than through complex artistrythe 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 interweavingof lives and plots. In multiple ways, Kieslowskis 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 thatmakes 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 ofhuman life. No argument can take someone from a neutral

stance towards the worldto insight into moral ontology.

hibbs - kieslowski's inescapable moral horizons

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