KIEŚLOWSKI'S SEEING I/EYE

Author(s): CHRISTOPHER GARBOWSKI

Source: The Polish Review , 1995, Vol. 40, No. 1 (1995), pp. 53-60
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Polish Institute of Arts &
Sciences of America

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25778825

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 The Polish Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, 1995:53-60
?1995 The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences

CHRISTOPHER GARBOWSKI

kieSlowskts seeing i/eye

There is a scene in Bleu [Blue] (1993), the opening film of Krzysztof
KieSlowski's trilogy Trois couleurs [Three Colors], which shows the
director's mastery of unspoken dialogue with the viewer. The film's heroine
Julie is sitting on a Parisian park bench facing the street. Following a white
out, we see a bent elderly lady on the sidewalk slowly walking toward a bin
with a plastic bottle in hand. She can barely reach the opening in order to
dispose of the bottle. The viewer has been cued previously by the "blue-outs"
that the white-out has to do with the three colours of the trilogy.
The problem dealt with in this vignette is "equality," or rather lack of it.
On the one hand, we have the young woman basking in the sun who in spite
of her tragedy has the future before her; on the other, the elderly woman who
is nearing the end of her life. Even the time in which the latter was born
seems wrong: her generation suffered from much poorer nutrition as evidenced
in her case by her stunted growth. The present time also mistreats this older
woman in many subtle ways; contemporary ergonomists have not bothered to
take her size into account when placing the holes in the garbage disposal
containers. Yet the same sun shines on both women and treats them with the
same warmth; at some level, unfathomable to us, they are equal.
This scene shows how even in his current works the Polish director is
influenced by his beginnings as a documentary filmmaker. The viewer is
asked to look carefully at insignificant people. The documentary eye aims in
its own way to achieve a similar effect that the director has worked on in his
films since Przypadek [Coincidence]. In this 1980 film, characters from one
part are met as anonymous passerbys in another part; hence the viewer is
invited to contemplate how someone unknown to you might be experiencing a
drama of profound dimensions. With his concern for the seemingly
anonymous person, even the simple passerby becomes a potential protagonist
for Kieslowski. The director seems to be saying this movie could just as well
be about him or her.
Does the eye always tell the truth though? In one of the early sequences of
Coincidence, Witek watches his friend Daniel leaving up a hill. When they
meet again after many years they reminisce about their parting. Witek
mentions having seen a car on top of the hill (the viewer also saw this car);
his friend denies that any car was there.

53

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 54 The Polish Review

The question raised by these sequences is more than just the subjectivity of
sight. Since the narration followed one protagonist's perception and not the
other, the problem of film art's reflexivity is alluded to. This is somewhat
reminiscent of that other documentarist-cum-narrative filmmaker, Antonioni,
and his films such as Blow-Up. Paul Coates notices when studying
KieSlowski's films that:

The presentation of the protagonist as a mirror image is typical of the

openings of Kieslowski's recent works: it is thus that Antek first appears,
reflected in a book case in No Bid (In Dekalog piec [Decalogue Five], the
lawyer character appears reflected in the mirror while he is readying himself
for his final bar exam - C.G.) [...] The films thus begin by reminding us that
what we see is not reality, but an image; that the true life is perpetually
displaced.1

Another symbol of reflexivity is Tomek's telescope in Dekalog szeSC

[Decalogue Six] through which we look at Magda and share the former's
voyeurism; the viewer is thus reminded of the voyeuristic nature of the
cinematic experience. Kieslowski, however, may be pointing out something
else as well. Charles Eidsvik interprets the director's intent in this way:

Unlike films (such as Peeping Tom or Rear Window ) in which there is

something perverse about voyeurism, in Kieslowski's world the urge to watch
is at least a result of the desire to share another's life, and a potential
preliminary to making closer contact.

Eidsvik goes as far as to say the director's works "have little interest in
reflexivity; his films are about people, not about movies."3
In both interpretations there is an element of truth. Much like a number of
contemporary filmmakers, Kieslowski does give indication through many
recurrent symbols in his films that this is a cinematic experience. His
philosophy seems to be, however, that one cannot plumb reality without
taking into account the fact of art, especially when this is the tool by which
the analysis is being undertaken. Otherwise the realism rings false.
Dekalog cztery [Decalogue Four] is a good illustration of this problem.
Anka, the heroine of this episode, finds herself in somewhat of a quandry. Her

1. Paul Coates, "Exile and Identity: Kieslowski and His Contemporaries," in

Before the Wall Came Down. Soviet and East European Filmmakers Working in
the West, Graham Petrie and Ruth Dwyer, editors (Lanham: University Press of
America, 1990), pp. 112.
2. Charles Eidsvik, "Kieslowski's 'Short Films'", Film Quarterly, 1990, Vol.
44, No. 1, pp. 53-54.
3. Eidsvik, p. 51.

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KieSlowski's Seeing I/Eve_55

conscience will not permit her to open a letter she has found, since that would
be going against her father's will. There has been extant tension between
father and daughter for a number of years and something must be done to
resolve this. Anka intuits the contents of the letter and makes her mind up to
confront her father. She herself is an acting student and decides to pretend that
she opened the letter and even goes as far as forging the unopened letter. Thus
this Anka who confronts her father becomes an "actress'' playing a role. Her
"art" is effective because at a deeper level her father wants to resolve the
problem as well. This daughter "protagonist" becomes real to him because
she speaks a truth he was in some ways not fully conscious of, nor was he
brave enough to deal with the problem openly.
Not just the viewer is asked to look carefully at the world and others; in
fact, it would seem that an important attribute of KieSlowski protagonists is
their ability to see. Ewa of Dekalog trzy [Decalogue Three] observes a young
boy who continually runs away from what is apparently a hospital on
Christmas Eve and identifies very closely with his efforts. Julie in Blue
converses with people in a cafe and looks toward a musician/vagrant(!) in the
square. This characteristic of the director's characters can be seen right from
his first short television fiction film Przejscie podziemne [Pedestrian Subway]
(1973), where the two protagonists eye the denizens of a subterranean habitat
in Warsaw from behind a peephole-like tear in a sheet of paper. Protagonists
are often given the sensitivity KieSlowski acquired as a documentary
filmmaker and thus sight is elevated to major component of their makeup.
Another aspect of the protagonist's sight must first be broached on
theoretical terms. There is a point at which the film protagonist's body could
be said to transcend the actor: when the spectator is cued that what he is
observing is an optical point of view of a not visible character. This is
impossible in any other art form. In the theater, if the spectator is in the right
position, it is possible to see more or less what the protagonist does, but from
a considerably different angle, plus the actor is visible at the same time. These
point of view shots are most effective when they are worked into the film
narrative in such a way that our empathy for the protagonist allows us to
understand what they are feeling at the time. The hero's "window on the
world" becomes his "mirror of the soul."4
In Decalogue Four, after a dramatic night where the heroine has confronted
her father with her doubts as to their "biological" relationship, she wakes up
to find him gone. Finally we see her at the window looking out frantically.
The window is several stories up in a high-rise apartment building. In the
next shot we look through Anka's eyes at a man walking off in the distance ?
it is her father. We feel her uncertainty: her father has been known to escape

4. For an analysis of the two types of seeing, see Martin Jay's Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California, 1993), pp. 1-20.

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 56 The Polish Review

from difficult situations ? is he running away now?

At times this inner body of the protagonist is almost palpable. In Dekalog
dziewieC [Decalogue Nine], for example, we have a number of contrasting
moods from a single protagonist's point of view. It is not hard to guess what
the hero of the episode feels when the surgeon general asks Roman to help
him pour some black market gasoline from a canister into his car. Roman has
recently discovered that his impotency is permanent. When he helps implant
the nozzle of the canister into the gas tank, the obsessed Roman sees a potent
phallus which contrasts with his flacid one. Yet toward the end of the episode,
a point of view shot for the same protagonist yields a different gamut of
emotions. The husband and wife have come up with a pragmatic solution for
their marital crisis, they will adopt a girl. Roman contentedly boils some
milk in his apartment's kitchen. We see his face looking out the window.
The camera focuses many stories lower to a girl playing with her doll.
Roman's dreams of a sedate family life for the viewer watching this scene are
almost tangible.
The most dramatic case of this subjective way of seeing is when two
characters are opposite each other in a shot/reverse-shot sequence, the camera
occupying the place of one and then the other of the characters.
Jean-Pierre Oudart finds such cases disturbing and believes the viewer is
"uneasy" when the camera is in such a position.5 Irrespective of the author's
complex theory of suture, part of the reason for this "uneasiness" must be the
unusual position the spectator is placed in. The typical shot/reverse-shot
situation involving two characters gives the viewer the screen just behind the
shoulders of one of the characters (or some other visible feature), and then
switches to a similarly landmarked view behind the second character with a
more or less frontal portrait of the opposite character.6 With both characters
in view, the spectator has a feeling of security; he or she is an arbitrator that
gets a good look at both "points of view." In the optical point of view
shot/reverse-shot the placement is subjectively reversed. For one thing, we
"share" the now invisible character's view in a peculiar way. The character in
front of the spectator as a rule does not look toward the camera (i.e. "us," plus
the off-screen character), but rather slightly to the left or right of us. Thus the
spectator has the feeling of the off-screen character being slightly behind his or
her shoulder; this can be just a little discomforting. Small wonder this
sequence is one of the least used in traditional (e.g. early Hollywood)
cinematography.
What is of further interest here is a certain "privilege" the viewer can be said
to gain and its relationship to the protagonist. This may be made clearer with

5. See David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University

of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 111.
6. For a detailed narrational analysis of the process, see Bordwell, pp. 110
113.

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KieSlowski's Seeing I/Eve_57.

the assistance of certain reflections of the early Bakhtin. In his essay Author
and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, Mikhail Bakhtin first examined the essential
place of the protagonist in art. It was here that he claimed that the body of the
protaganist is essential in organizing the axiological space of the work of art.7
While reflecting on aspects of the mind/world split, Bakhtin utilized a
metaphor that is relevant to our concerns.
It can be reasonably stated that no two bodies occupy the same space at the
same time. Thus what the person across from the other sees is different; even
moving closer together their line of vision cannot be identical. For instance,
one can see the other's back which is impossible for the first person and vice
versa. In terms of you and I, we both have an "excess of seeing"8 in relation
to each other. This is vital because, according to Bakhtin:

Ethical and aesthetic objectification requires a powerful point d'appui outside

itself; it requires some genuine source of real strength out of which I would be
capable of seeing myself as another.9

Returning to the metaphor of sight, there is no way of gaining this excess

of seeing by one's self. Even with the help of a mirror the self seen is not
fully identified with and is evaluated "not for ourselves, but for others and
through others."10 For example, the above mentioned lawyer protagonist was
examining his appearance to please his examiners to be.
Only the other, by sharing his surplus of seeing can fully complete us.
Thus Bakhtin posits an invisible internal self and a visible external one. In
the relationship between I and the other sharing our surplus of seeing, a
dialogic space is created. Two fragmentary visions are "sutured" together one
might say.
In the shot/reverse-shot with the optical point of view of the characters film
comes closest to creating such dialogic space. Whereas in film, as opposed to
the novel, we do not have the internal body's most effective presence, i.e.
thought or internal speech, the internal body of the protagonist's most
physical trace is sight. And this sight is most dramatically cued by the
reciprocating look of another character or protagonist. The spectator is
brought into this spacial dialogue as well: sharing by proxy the internal body
of first one and then the next character by seeing what they see.
hi Coincidence, KieSlowski's second-last film before the Decalogue series
(1988), there is a scene in which the protagonist Witek converses with Werner,
7. Cf. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M.Bakhtin,
M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, editors; translation and notes by V. Liapunov
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 98-99, 188.
8. Art and Answerability..., p. 23.
9. Art and Answerability..., p. 31.
10. Art and Answerability..., p. 33.

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 58 The Polish Review

an older Communist he has met on a train. This part of the film is dominated
by long travelling takes, such as the camera following Witek into the kitchen
and then back into the main room. And so the shot/reverse-shot sequence of
their conversation is also somewhat slower than is usual in films, heightening
the intimacy of their dialogue. Yet only Werner is given an inner body and we
see Witek through his eyes, i.e. during a key shot/reverse-shot sequence in
Werner's appartment, we see Witek through Werner's eyes (Werner off screen)
while in the reverse shot we are looking over Witek's shoulder. The major
protagonist is constantly in our sight, as if under a microscope. Why is this
the case? The reasons for a director's choices can only be inferred, but I would
like to point out a few considerations.
Coincidence is a film in which Kieslowski explores the responsibility
people have towards others. The director is fascinated by the territory between
optimism and pessimism. The film shows three possible scenarios of a single
protagonist's life; each differing diametrically. Although circumstance would
seem to be a dominating factor in why the protagonist lives out one scenario
and not another, there is another consideration which plays a determining role.
At a crucial point Witek is at a disoriented stage of his life; his influential
father has just died, necessitating him to make his own choices. Because of
chance, the protagonist meets a different person in each case. This person has
a decisive influence on which path Witek takes after meeting him or her.
One of these influential people happens to be Werner. He is a Communist
by conviction, but he has been sorely disillusioned by the practice of the
Communist State. Werner is himself a little undecided at this juncture, but he
has an edge over Witek in experience and he has an authentic, if tarnished,
dream. This edge over his younger interlocutor is partly expressed in vision:
in the shot sequence we have examined Witek is visually bared before the older
man.

Later in the film Werner's friend Adam gives Witek an applicatio

the Communist party. Witek asks Werner what he should do; he is
much, merely for advice. This he does not receive from Werner
gives him the evasive answer: "Do whatever you want." Ultim
course, we are responsible for our own decisions, but the the directo
imply that none the less we do have a responsibility to do what we
others. Werner had influenced his young friend a great deal and had
led him to a certain predicament, but he was unwilling to tell him o
another, or even more fully share his doubts.
In a way, through sharing this surplus of vision with Werner, the
also implied in this responsibility toward the protagonist.
interview regarding the Decalogue series, Kieslowski said that
message he tried to impart was that the viewer become more sensit
people around him.11 In the I-Other relationship, the Wite
11. See Krzysztof Kieslowski, "Pomoc samemu sobie. Z ... rozma

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KieSlowski's Seeing I/Eve_59

protagonist is the profound "other," he is exposed before us and we are asked

how we would respond to him.
A build-up of dialogic space in Decalog jeden [Decalogue One] is likewise
instructive. The sequences that deal with the main characters primarily
involve Krzysztof, the father, and Pawel, the son, or the latter with Irena, his
aunt; the father also appears briefly with the sister. There is an intimate
relationship between the father and son. The traditional over-the-shoulder
point of view shot/reverse-shot is rarely used. But neither is the optical point
of view version as such. The spectator is given oblique points of view of the
son (father not visible), with something approaching optical points-of-view of
the father. In this case it is a major character that has the surplus of seeing.
But the eye-line is different: the son is looking up at his father, it is a
questioning look.
The dialogic shots are similar in the scenes with the boy and his aunt, only
here a situation does develop with almost equal optical point of view
exchanges. This is an interesting sequence, when the boy and aunt maneuver
into a two-shot establishing frame they are almost touching, then there follow
several optical point of view exchanges and the distance between them is
physically increased without any narrational clue of them having moved away
from each other. The reason seems obviously the technical requirement of at
least minimal distance for the shot/reverse-shot exchanges, which is made up
for artistically by the emotional closeness of such shots.
Finally, after exploring the dialogic potential of the shot/reverse-shot
sequence in the confrontation of protagonists and characters, let us not forget
that it is at one level simply a compositional device in the film narrative.
Perhaps the "ideal" dialogic sequence would be of one hundred and eighty
degree shots with the characters equally framed; this is rarely the case. More
typical is the exchange in Dekalog osiem [Decalogue Eight]: Zofia and
Elizabeth face each other in the former's apartment after a dramatic evening.
Zofia is quite submissive, she has successfully broken through the barrier
between them erected by an ignoble incident in their mutual past and now they
are communicating. The exchange is quite tender. To show that she is
submitting herself totally to Elizabeth's judgement, Zofia is exposed in a
stirring series of close-ups while the latter is framed from the bust up, looking
just slightly down at her. This artistic device best externalizes the
protagonists' relationship. Can it be called dialogic, though, with such
intervention on the part of the director?
What is beyond question, however, is that such a shot sequence can best be
used by filmmakers who genuinely believe in their protagonists and that the
latter really have something worthwhile to communicate to each other and
thus to the viewer. Significantly, directors such as Antonioni that have virtu

usz Szyma", Tygodnik Powszechny, 1989, No. 46, pp. 6-7.

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60 The Polish Review

ally abandoned this shot sequence typically dwell on the alienation of their
protagonists.
The vision we infer to a protagonist organizes the aesthetic persona in a
manner that is not possible in the novel, adding another dimension to its
realism. If we accept Bakhtin's analysis of the protagonists in Dostoevsky, it
is in the realm of ideas where we find the most potent organizing factor for the
literary work of art. Ideas explore the verbal aspect of thought and allow us to
quite effectively enter the inner body of the protagonist. Is the verbal
component of thought the only one worth exploring though? There is also a
strong nonverbal, or "preverbal" aspect of thought that although it does not
escape linguistic description, certainly loses substantially by it. And at this
juncture vision is a much stronger medium for evoking such "thought."
This brings us back to Kieslowski. All things considered, few
contemporary directors can match him in allowing the viewer to enter the
protagonist's realm of vision and thus sharing his or her /.

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