I saw this a while ago, and didn't click with it. I didn't like it nearly as much as the rest of Kieslowski's work that I'd seen. I thought I'd watch it again as my love and admiration for Kieslowski's work has only grown. I think I could say I love this now.
Showing posts with label Krzysztof Kieslowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Krzysztof Kieslowski. Show all posts
Friday, 2 May 2008
Friday, 25 April 2008
Two guiding stars...
The film I've been working on with Tobias for over a year now has been rather hard work. Most of that work has been mental, a processing of ideas and various attempts at gathering them into a coherent whole. I suppose that is the work of all writers. This has been more difficult though.
The reason it's been so difficult is not really to do with the story. It is about style, and as such should perhaps not be given the notoriety I am giving it here, but nonetheless it has been my biggest - and most consistent - problem. It is this: my attempt to reconcile my admiration for two (apparently) mutually exclusive styles. A documentary-like realism and naturalism and a visually-arresting magical "other"-world. I like each as much as the other, and find it difficult to focus on just one when writing. The result is writing a scene in whichever style I feel I'm "in" that particular day, then doing away with it the next.
However, I think I've managed to achieve some form of synthesis, thanks to two guiding stars, who both, in their entirely separate ways, manage to reconcile these elements: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Michel Gondry. Both manage to ground their stories in a believable, emotionally honest reality whilst acknowledging the magic of everyday life, Kieslowski in his almost spiritual mise-en-scene and pacing, Gondry in his rabid visual imagination.
Of course this voyage of discovery wouldn't be complete without a new problem at the end of it: how not to write a Gondlowski-Kiesry rip-off!
The reason it's been so difficult is not really to do with the story. It is about style, and as such should perhaps not be given the notoriety I am giving it here, but nonetheless it has been my biggest - and most consistent - problem. It is this: my attempt to reconcile my admiration for two (apparently) mutually exclusive styles. A documentary-like realism and naturalism and a visually-arresting magical "other"-world. I like each as much as the other, and find it difficult to focus on just one when writing. The result is writing a scene in whichever style I feel I'm "in" that particular day, then doing away with it the next.
However, I think I've managed to achieve some form of synthesis, thanks to two guiding stars, who both, in their entirely separate ways, manage to reconcile these elements: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Michel Gondry. Both manage to ground their stories in a believable, emotionally honest reality whilst acknowledging the magic of everyday life, Kieslowski in his almost spiritual mise-en-scene and pacing, Gondry in his rabid visual imagination.
Of course this voyage of discovery wouldn't be complete without a new problem at the end of it: how not to write a Gondlowski-Kiesry rip-off!
Saturday, 19 April 2008
Dekalog: The Ten Commandments Part 2
This didn't quite catch me as much as the first part, most probably due to the somewhat unlikeable character and the slightly-too-slow pace for someone half-exhausted such as myself.
But putting that aside for a moment and trying to think more objectively, I find myself admiring the marriage of pace and subject matter.
This film concerns a woman whose husband is dying in hospital and who carries a baby that is not his. Her dilemma is this, in her own words: if her husband lives, then she cannot keep the baby. She has always wanted children, and this is her only chance to do so. Up until this moment, she thought she couldn't have them.
The film revolves around the series of encounters she has with the doctor caring for her husband. The unlikeable character mentioned earlier is not her but the doctor, a stern, unloving man numbed to humanity by the apparent death of his wife and children, the story of which he re-tells to his cleaner in moments interspersed with the "real" action. He eschews most other human contact and interacts verbally with grunts or the bare minimum of words. He has survived the tragedy of his family it seems through a mixture of the certainties of medicine and the tweeting of his pet budgie.
This life only now being half-lived, the slow counting of days, is mirrored in the husband lying in a hospital ward. He is half-comatose, half-dead already, his link with the outside world a monotonous dripping of rusted water from the ceiling. This is perhaps ever-so-slightly heavy handed from Kieslowski, as with the final shot of a wasp struggling - but making it - out of a cup of juice. Like the husband, it clings to life, barely managing to pull itself out of death. But perhaps that's the film student in me. It certainly works, there's no question about that; in fact the image of the wasp crawling up the spoon out of this red liquid is potentially iconic, and a wonderful metaphor for the seemingly miraculous recovery of the husband.
What this episode does is confirm my feelings about Kieslowski's genius. Part 1 was not an aberration, and my memories of the episode known as "A Short Film About Love" serve to further that impression. He has the ability to say a great deal in so few images, so few words. In cinema, that is a rare - and necessary - quality.
But putting that aside for a moment and trying to think more objectively, I find myself admiring the marriage of pace and subject matter.
This film concerns a woman whose husband is dying in hospital and who carries a baby that is not his. Her dilemma is this, in her own words: if her husband lives, then she cannot keep the baby. She has always wanted children, and this is her only chance to do so. Up until this moment, she thought she couldn't have them.
The film revolves around the series of encounters she has with the doctor caring for her husband. The unlikeable character mentioned earlier is not her but the doctor, a stern, unloving man numbed to humanity by the apparent death of his wife and children, the story of which he re-tells to his cleaner in moments interspersed with the "real" action. He eschews most other human contact and interacts verbally with grunts or the bare minimum of words. He has survived the tragedy of his family it seems through a mixture of the certainties of medicine and the tweeting of his pet budgie.
This life only now being half-lived, the slow counting of days, is mirrored in the husband lying in a hospital ward. He is half-comatose, half-dead already, his link with the outside world a monotonous dripping of rusted water from the ceiling. This is perhaps ever-so-slightly heavy handed from Kieslowski, as with the final shot of a wasp struggling - but making it - out of a cup of juice. Like the husband, it clings to life, barely managing to pull itself out of death. But perhaps that's the film student in me. It certainly works, there's no question about that; in fact the image of the wasp crawling up the spoon out of this red liquid is potentially iconic, and a wonderful metaphor for the seemingly miraculous recovery of the husband.
What this episode does is confirm my feelings about Kieslowski's genius. Part 1 was not an aberration, and my memories of the episode known as "A Short Film About Love" serve to further that impression. He has the ability to say a great deal in so few images, so few words. In cinema, that is a rare - and necessary - quality.
Friday, 18 April 2008
Dekalog: The Ten Commandments Part 1
I'm discovering these anew. It's been so long since I last watched them that I can't remember which ones I've seen and which ones not. I'd forgotten what a master Kieslowski is. He had the mark of a genius. The first Dekalog is devastating, it tells you more about human existence in an hour than Ben Affleck's entire career. Absolutely mind-blowing.
I had to look up the Ten Commandments and even then it's rather more confusing than you'd assume, as different religious traditions assign different numbers to different commandments, but the general gist of the first is "I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other Gods before me". Kieslowski moulds this into the tussle between science and religion, between the reasoned measurements of the computers Pavel and his father are fascinated by and the unpredictability of the weather, the randomness of probability. I fear to say more unless I give it away, but it's completely riveting cinema.
I've been dipping in and out of Robert McKee's infamous Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting recently and one particular passage sticks in my mind. He says that part of a successful screenplay is managing to unearth a "universally human experience, then [wrapping it into] a unique, culture-specific expression". If ever this idea was born out in film, then this is it. The snow-covered, wind-battered Communist tower blocks of 80s Poland could only be of that time and place, the dominance of white and grey, the restrained pallet, but those archetypal themes of faith and belief, of youthful wonder and questioning, could be set down anywhere in the world.
I had to look up the Ten Commandments and even then it's rather more confusing than you'd assume, as different religious traditions assign different numbers to different commandments, but the general gist of the first is "I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other Gods before me". Kieslowski moulds this into the tussle between science and religion, between the reasoned measurements of the computers Pavel and his father are fascinated by and the unpredictability of the weather, the randomness of probability. I fear to say more unless I give it away, but it's completely riveting cinema.
I've been dipping in and out of Robert McKee's infamous Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting recently and one particular passage sticks in my mind. He says that part of a successful screenplay is managing to unearth a "universally human experience, then [wrapping it into] a unique, culture-specific expression". If ever this idea was born out in film, then this is it. The snow-covered, wind-battered Communist tower blocks of 80s Poland could only be of that time and place, the dominance of white and grey, the restrained pallet, but those archetypal themes of faith and belief, of youthful wonder and questioning, could be set down anywhere in the world.
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