Paste your essay in here…Through the filmography of Kieślowski we appreciate a progressive growth of his particular universe. A series of aesthetic motifs, the thematic transfers and anecdotal communications between films are testimony that he poured his personal imagination over and over again into them.
This type of constant dialogue with the work itself is common in many auteurs. The auteurs tend to be egocentric, in the sense that their work emanates almost exclusively from their internal forum. The same images, exact visual compositions, are often repeated in different films because they fascinate them in a very personal way. The same stories are interpreted and reinterpreted, as if they were stories transmitted orally through the centuries. Each new version brings a slight change from the original, emphasising other facets previously ignored. The auteur listens to himself and reinterprets himself.
As we have seen throughout this study, there was an evolution within the Kieślowski films, from films contextualised in the Polish reality, which are a valuable document of the customs and way of life in the 70s and 80s, until the immersion in the cinema art and in the immensities of psychology and spirituality. Many have gone further and described his latest cinema as banal, popular philosophy. The truth is that this "jump" is not so much an exhaustive analysis, the same Kieślowskian concerns are present from the first short film made as a student to the end. There is a quite organic and understandable evolution that points out that maybe Kieślowski refined his cinema little by little until he had the core of what he wanted to transmit from the beginning.
Kieślowski’s uninterrupted continuity of ordinary everyday events, small individual or even elusive moments of the life of the characters, and his imagination of the inner being of a human are organically linked to the representation of reality in all her ambiguity. Whatever we want to call it, it is a fact that The Double Life of Veronique has to do with life and with something real, and therefore with film art. Because of the remarkable use of the long takes, we can see how Kieślowski builds up the mise-en-scène and how he manages to merge very complex elements of the mise-en-scène into a long take and thereby his content to bring expression.
After briefly reviewing Kieślowski's path, it seems appropriate to say that the documentary gave him a tool for reflecting on reality that he never left, a concern that went beyond the limits established for the documentary. It led him to cultivate such a marked skepticism that he distinguished himself by fleeing all affiliation to one side or the other, to the extreme point of focusing only on the universal of the human being, his pain and his passion.
Here we have seen some of the binomials that will shape his vision of the auteur: the ethics of the private, of private individuals, as opposed to public ethics; the search for a universal truth against the truth of a political faction; the pessimism regarding social change at the hand of politics.
The characters he would draw in his fictions would be continually besieged by these dilemmas, inherited from him. In his latest films, he would gradually abandon social combat to focus on an increasingly existential struggle.
Kieślowski is a director that many have considered moralistic, of course raised with seriousness and great dilemmas that involve the life of the human being, but deep down he was not as concerned in instructing the world. Finally, the responsibility of the auteur not only in the content of his work, but in the continuation of the lives of those involved is essential in his vision of art.
This is revolutionary and original, few directors live their work as an integrated space in life, and rather draw a clear line – between the values promoted in life and the values of the work. There is a a long list films dealing with the director's own concerns about being an auteur that are reflected in their films, and that leave us always with open questions to answer on our own.
Kieślowski's own professional decisions seem loaded with meaning: from the decision to move from documentary to fiction so as not to hurt the real lives of their protagonists, through the ambitious work done in The Decalogue with the purpose of the Polish union and the moral education, until the decision to move to France and direct his final four films.
These decisions make us think about the great relevance that his production had for him, tormenting and encouraging him in equal parts. His changes and his ambivalent attitude towards his work give us the vision of a man who constantly considered the validity of his actions.