an extract from

Memory and Survival

The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski

E W

European Humanities Research Centre

University of Oxford
Research Monographs in French Studies 

 E W: M  S ()

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 E W: M  S () 

CONTENTS
❖

Acknowledgements xiii
Preface: In Memoriam xv
 Images in Crystal: La Double Vie de Véronique 
 Amnesia and the Time-Image: Trois Couleurs: Bleu 
 Voyeurism and Futurity: Trois Couleurs: Blanc 
 Identification and Disaster: Trois Couleurs: Rouge 
Conclusion: Home Movies 
Filmography 
Bibliography 
Index 
 E W: M  S ()

P R E FAC E
❖

In Memoriam
Krzysztof Kieślowski died after a second heart attack on  March
. He had undergone bypass surgery just two days earlier. He had
already long publicly announced his intention to give up filmmaking
and lead a life in retirement. Details of his funeral on  March 
were posted on the internet. A casket with Kieślowski’s body was
made available for public viewing in a church in Warsaw for two
hours. Hundreds of people came to pay their respects, bringing many
flowers. The Primate of Poland, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, said a short
prayer. The funeral mass was celebrated by Fr Jozef Tischner. Music
for the mass was composed specially for the occasion by Zbigniew
Preisner, and sung by Elżbieta Towarnicka. Kieślowski was later
buried in Powa̧zki cemetery, but the burial ceremony was attended
only by his family and closest friends. At the funeral mass, we are told,
‘the familiar faces of Zbigniew Preisner, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Juliette
Binoche and Irène Jacob were also seen in the crowd’. The scene
reads disquietingly like one which might appear in a Kieślowski film.
This is a study of memory and survival. It has taken shape in the
aftermath of Kieślowski’s filmmaking; its function is both retrospective
and commemorative. Kieślowski is a filmmaker who has frequently
taken memory itself, and resurrection, as his subject. It seems
peculiarly apt, therefore, to look back at his filmmaking, to survey his
work, from the closure and conclusion his death has confirmed.
Kieślowski’s obituaries stress the double loss, at once human and
cinematic, his death has wrought. This only highlights the double
pattern of memory traces I draw out in his work.
Kieślowski is a director of intimacy and interiority: he has renewed
the representation of the human subject and emotion in cinema. His
is a cinema of interference and internal reflection, where space and
luminous surface offer the finest, most fragile impressions of states of
mind and human consciousness. Foremost in these subjective
 E W: M  S () 

disclosures are relations of the subject to time, memory and personal

history. For Kieślowski, identities are temporal: in their temporality
lies their ephemerality, their contingency. He creates a cinema of
identity in time and motion. It is profoundly a cinema of regret and
loss, yet also a cinema of blind chance and fleeting beauty.
For Kieślowski, memory is bound up with image-making. Cinema
is a commemorative art and as such it is commemorated in
Kieślowski’s work. Where memory is subjective and personal for
Kieślowski, it is also cinematic. This is thrown further into relief in his
French cinema which is primarily my subject here. Kieślowski’s
French cinema is in part a cinema of artistic exile and of visual self-
consciousness. Kieślowski takes his place in French filmmaking
through a series of internal references, homages, debts which filter his
vision. Filmic allusions exist as so many memory traces, as moments
of exchange between director and cinephile viewer. Kieślowski’s
memory is made our own, is made up of the images of others, in
another language and another country.
Throughout this project, with reluctance and a degree of
embarrassment, I adopt an auteurist stance to what I call Kieślowski’s
cinema. This has seemed appropriate in a study concerned with the
self-definition, the temporal and national placing of a small corpus of
films. Kieślowski is fast proving the progeny of such poetic directors
as Bergman and Tarkovsky, and as such now enjoys posthumously a
certain degree of adulation. Since the corpus of his work, his spiritual
and philosophical concerns, his visual style, are well defined, easily
recognizable and, better still, recognizably significant, his status as
European auteur seems unquestioned. Yet I should stress that my desire
here is not directly to confirm this (or challenge it). For me, the
repetitions and (in)constancies of Kieślowski’s work are interesting
primarily in terms of their challenge to the memory and vigilance of
the viewer. Continuity becomes an ironic means of measuring
divergence. Likewise Kieślowski, as auteur, seeks not so much to
affirm his subjectivity and first-person stance as to question the
distortions and particularities of subjective vision, and of personal
cinema. An auteurist approach risks appearing outmoded, completist,
erroneously self-assured. Kieślowski’s cinema offers no such
certainties. In a sense, he frequently takes as his subject the desire for
mastery of critic and spectator alike, only to show the fissures and
warps in the field of vision. His is a cinema of optical illusion and
mental trauma: as such it is a cinema of paradox sustaining itself
6 E W: M  S ()

despite interruption and intrusion. Survival is the surprising subject

of his work, survival in denial and disavowal, survival in the present
and present absence of the past. Kieślowski’s cinema continually re-
presents itself. Yet its memory traces are indelible, insistent. It is to
their survival in my mind that I owe the impulse to write this work.
I never met Krzysztof Kieślowski. I have only seen fleeting
cinematic and photographic images of him. One such image appears
in Rouge as Kieślowski can be glimpsed briefly amongst the passengers
boarding the ferry on the night before the disaster. We see him
disappear into the hold amongst the hundreds who will not survive.
Here it seems that, in the most unobtrusive manner, Kieślowski
creates his own memorial, a barely perceptible memento mori.