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Tropes shusaku endo12/31/2023 ![]() How can we reconcile Thomson’s response with Emma Wilson’s description of Kieślowski as a director of intimacy and interiority (xv), and with the fact that many viewers of his films were so affected and engaged by them that they felt a deep connection with the taciturn filmmaker and profound grief when he died? to see a Kieślowski film for me requires a steeling, as if I were going into torture or church (468). David Thomson, for one, recognizes Kieślowski’s mastery and connects him with such figures as Robert Bresson, but he also asserts that, for me, Kieślowski frequently runs the risk of being precious, mannered, and so cold as to forbid touching. Another curious class of critic begrudgingly admits Kieślowski’s importance while finding the films almost unwatchable. Perhaps most infamously, David Denby used the occasion of the release of Three Colors: Red (1994) to lament the state of the European cinema in general and to dismiss the importance of Kieślowski, its current hero, in particular: He’s essentially a constructor of intricate puzzles an artificer, perhaps, but not an artist (85). Still other critics question the value of all of Kieślowski’s metaphysical films, including the Polish films, from Blind Chance (1981 released 1987) on. For critics who adopt this attitude, Kieślowski had clearly lost his bearings in the postcommunist, extra-Polish context. Perhaps this late work evidenced what Robert Stam has termed the ephemeral, artificial, and polyglot style of transnational cinema or Marek Haltof has labeled the self-important strategies typical of art cinema (Haltof, Cinema 111–14). For some, particularly Polish critics, Kieślowski’s work up until 1989 was motivated by and important within the Polish communist context, but his last four films, all international coproductions made largely outside Poland and predominantly in French, demonstrated a suspicious involvement with beautiful images and a dreamy disengagement from the messy substance of the world, even while purportedly maintaining a commitment to ethical and existential investigations. On the other hand, his importance has been heavily qualified on a whole range of accounts. For his adulators, his movement from the early documentaries to the last feature films, from small-scale Polish documentaries on pointedly political subjects to lavish international coproductions probing metaphysical questions, marked the increasing depth and mastery of the maturing artist. On the one hand, he has been hailed as one of the greatest directors of all time, lamented at the time of his death as one of the few European directors capable of measuring up to the giants of the past (Malcolm 26) and elevated to the elect of world cinema alongside Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu, Max Ophuls, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Since Kieślowski died unexpectedly on 13 March 1996 at the age of fifty-four, arguably at precisely the moment he had reached the height of his career with the critical success of the Three Colors (1993–94) trilogy, his critical reputation has become divided. But it is precisely because of his premature death, coming at a moment when his films were beginning to be seen by large audiences internationally, that his legacy is worth investigating. ![]() 1980), whose influence is both pervasive and diffuse, Kieślowski has not been dead so long, and his work has not been seen so much. Unlike a filmmaker such as Alfred Hitchcock (d. This collection of essays investigates two aspects of the legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–96): films produced after his death by other filmmakers using his scripts and ideas and the prescient thematic, stylistic, and philosophical preoccupations particular to his oeuvre that have subsequently been developed in an extraordinarily wide variety of films and television serials in the years since his death.
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