Krzysztof Kieslowski

 Krzysztof Kieslowski

Kieslowski
1) Made several films in Poland before settling in France.
2) His ten part Decalogue (1989) was produced for Polish TV.

The Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White and Red

1) Kieslowski is perhaps best known for his Three Colors Trilogy released in 1993/1994.
2)  Each of the trilogy’s three parts (Blue, White, and Red) are named after the colors of the French flag
     and correspond to the political ideals in the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality, and
     fraternity.
3)Three Colors: Blue is set in Paris and is about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car
   accident. She attempts to cut herself off and live in isolation but finds she is unable to.

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
1)Stars Irène Jacob in a duel role: the characters of Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double,
   Véronique, a French music teacher.

Critic Jonathan Romney analyzes the narrative and visuals of The Double Life of Veronique:
 "The narrative, as it develops, is anything but simple. Weronika, the young Polish woman, is by chance—after singing impromptu at a friend’s rehearsal—offered an audition and ultimately a solo part in a concert. Suffering from heart problems, she dies in mid-recital, shortly after seeing her doppelgänger in a Kraków square. That double is the French music teacher Véronique; immediately after the death of Weronika, of whose existence she has no inkling, Véronique experiences an uncanny sense of grief and solitude and consequently quits her other career as a singer. She later falls in love with a puppeteer, Alexandre, whose image she sees in a mirror while he is performing at her school.

Equally self-reflexive is the film’s visual theme of containment and filtering. Its opening image is of sky and earth reversed, seen by Weronika as a child, held upside down by her mother. Later, the adult Weronika sees the world inverted in a transparent ball in which stars float; in the same scene, her train window distorts the landscape outside, seeming to open it up in small folds. Kieślowski and director of photography Sławomir Idziak consistently use a yellow-green filter that fills the world with a seemingly benign, autumnal glow. Kieślowski claimed that this choice of color was a matter of visual contrast, determined by the dominant gray of the film’s locations, Kraków and Clermont-Ferrand. Yet overall, the golden filtering transcends any obvious motivation. The brief credit sequence shows a prefigurement of Weronika in the Kraków square, as if the moment were suspended outside time, captured in a distorting lens. Later, when Véronique receives the mysterious phone call, we see a reprise of Weronika’s death, an image dimly seen through an amorphous body of red-brown light or liquid, as if preserved in an amniotic haze. While most events in the film are witnessed or experienced by one of the two heroines, here we cannot be sure who sees these images, or what the filter is that they pass through. At such moments, the film’s precarious realism collapses, and a sense of the mystical or metaphorical imposes itself."

Scene description: 

The following scene shows the death of Weronika.
The visual color scheme that Romney describes is highly apparent here:

The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991):

Starts with a symphony concert full house. A woman sings acapela beautiful...she's a young pretty girl. 
Then the symphony and another woman joins. The concert area turns green - like hitchcock in vertigo. When she dies it changes from green to brown and there are overhead pictures of the audience and the camera swirls around now with a back view of the orchestra and audience. Yhen we see her being buried from the point of view of a person in the coffin. 

The clip of her singing and when she dies Click Here 

A post about the film Click Here

Post Class:

Article on why this is Kieslowski's best film Click Here

Kieloswski and Juliette Binoche in Bleu 1993

Article about Kieloswski - in depth called Notebook.
Click Here
“Everybody’s life is worthy of scrutiny, has its secrets and dramas...” — Krzysztof Kieślowski