Requiem for Kieslowski

27/03/1999

Explicitly spiritual and religious themes are treated in the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski. The Polish director has been remembered in London this month, three years after his death. A journalist spoke to Zbigniew Preisner, who wrote music for the films, and Krzysztof Wierzbicki, who worked as Kieslowski?s assistant. THE visionary Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, creator of such enigmatic and intensely spiritual works as The Double Life of V?ronique and the Three Colours trilogy, died three years ago this month. To mark the anniversary, his close friend and former colleague, the composer Zbigniew Preisner, brought his Requiem for My Friend, a work written in honour of Kieslowski, to London and earned a standing ovation from 3,000 people at a packed Royal Festival Hall last week. Preisner?s haunting, melodic and utterly distinctive music, which is often attributed on screen to his fictitious alter ego Van den Budenmayer, is an essential element of all Kieslowski?s best-known films. In some works, notably V?ronique and Blue, music, and the price paid for its mysterious creation, become central to the story. As one critic observed, in Kieslowski?s films the images often seem to be vehicles for Preisner?s powerful music rather than the other way round. The two men enjoyed a relationship which stands alongside partnerships such as those of Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone, Bernard Herrman and Alfred Hitchcock, and Fellini and Nino Rota as among the most potent in film history.

More important, says Preisner, he and Kieslowski were friends. We were very, very close. From 1983 until he died, I composed for all Krzysztof?s movies, 17 of them. We spent a lot of time together, went on holidays together, spent time in each other?s homes. He was my friend first and a film director second.

Preisner says the first part of his Requiem for My Friend, a simple, piercing piece written for voices and church organ, was an instinctive, emotional response to the shock of Kieslowski?s death at the age of 54 following a heart bypass operation.

I didn?t have time to think about it. I started to write the night Krzysztof died and composed the whole thing over three nights. The requiem was a reaction to my shock that I couldn?t help him. To write a requiem was my only thought. It is difficult to talk about it because it is very private. If I had been a painter, maybe I would have painted a picture. If I was a writer, I?d have written a book. But I am a composer.

Preisner says he tried to avoid the dramatic features of the requiem as a musical art form. I didn?t want it to be very ?artistic?, but from the heart. I wanted to make it as simple as possible, virtually like a hymn or the kind of church music which can be sung almost by anyone.

The equally moving second part of the work, celebrating Kieslowski?s life, is more expansive. It opens with a bluesy, haunting saxophone (the saxophone is a big metaphysical instrument, Preisner explains) and features a 40-voice choir and full orchestra. This element of the work grew out of a planned Concert of Life ? a multi-media event ? which Preisner, Kieslowski and his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz intended to stage on the Acropolis in Athens.

The composer and director?s working methods were as unique as their films. While most film music is stuck over the top of a finished film, Preisner was intimately involved with every step of the film-making process. Sometimes, he says, he inspired me; sometimes I inspired him. Preisner was often involved at the earliest stage of a project. A new movie is born a long time before the script, before any conception of it. It can be an idea, sometimes just a feeling, he says enigmatically.

Kieslowski often claimed to have little understanding of music. But Preisner dismisses this: It was not true. For a film director, the important thing is to know what he wants from the music, if he has a conception for its function. And Krzysztof knew this. I followed what he wanted, nothing more.

Kieslowski gave Preisner considerable freedom. For example, the script for the extraordinary concert scene in The Double Life of V?ronique, where the Polish Veronika dies for her art, stated baldly: Veronika sings: beautiful song. Preisner recalls: I said: OK, Krzysztof, but what? He said: I don?t know: find something. So I looked and I found the words from Dante?s Divine Comedy. He said: OK, that makes sense. In fact, Dante?s poetry has nothing to do with the subject and the words were sung in old Italian. Yet the sound was perfect. As Kieslowski later commented: For Preisner, instrumentation is just as important as the melody.

A key scene in Three Colours: Blue explores the process of instrumentation itself. It shows Julie (Juliette Binoche) trying out the various musical colours of the orchestra as she works to complete her late husband?s Song for the Unification of Europe. Preisner?s own favourite is a form of dramatic tension: My favourite instrument is silence, but this silence must be prepared: you must play before it and you must play after. Then silence is the most beautiful music.

Kieslowski also credited Preisner for the idea of the final montage in Blue, an intensely moving sequence which sums up Julie?s emergence from grief-filled isolation. This time Preisner adapted St Paul?s Letter to the Corinthians as his text. Though I speak with the tongues of angels, the music thunders, if I have not love, I am become as hollow brass. Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have enough faith to move the mightiest mountains, if I have not love I am nothing.

Kieslowski, who retired from film making after Red in 1995, was an avowedly non-religious man, yet his films, notably the extraordinary Decalogue (10 television films about each of the Ten Commandments, set on a bleak Warsaw housing estate), are perhaps more intensely and centrally concerned with the spiritual than those of any other modern director except Bergman, Tarkovsky or Bresson. Krzysztof had a good line to God, says Preisner. That was the whole mystery about him. But it was a very private thing for him. We never discussed it.

WHEN he died, Kieslowski was developing scripts for a new trilogy on Paradise, Hell and Purgatory, though he did not plan to direct them. The Hell story got no further than the outline stage, but treatments were completed for Heaven and Purgatory. Krzysztof Piesiewicz is now planning to bring both projects to the screen with a French director next year, though what resemblance the completed films might have to Kieslowski?s original vision is impossible to guess.

One critic noticed that the more concrete Kieslowski?s stories were, the more metaphysical they seemed to become. Preisner?s music carries much of the spiritual energy of the films but the images themselves of people, animals, puppets, trees, buildings seem loaded with elusive poetic significance. What is the meaning of the light which enters Irene Jacob?s room in V?ronique and which heralds the moment of musical creation in Blue? Who is the mysterious figure, never even identified in the credits, who appears at key moments of the Decalogue? Is the omniscient, deeply-wounded former judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in Red in some way God-like?

In one of his last interviews, Kieslowski told the English critic Geoff Andrew about the frustrations of exploring the spiritual: Film is very materialistic. All you can photograph, most of the time, is things. You can describe a soul, but you can?t photograph it; you have to find an equivalent. But there isn?t really an equivalent. Film is helpless when it comes to describing the soul, just as it is in describing many other things, like a state of consciousness. You have to find methods, tricks, which may be more or less successful in making it understood that this is what your film is about.

Another friend, Krzysztof Wierzbicki, who worked as Kieslowski?s assistant and directed the definitive documentary about him, I?m So-So (shown in a short Kieslowski season at the Curzon Soho cinema in London this week), confirms that Kieslowski was frustrated by the limitations of film. He always used to say: ?If I make a film, I can obtain maybe 30 or 40 per cent of what I tried to achieve.? He was never satisfied.

Wierzbicki insists that while Kieslowski?s films may seem complex and elusively opaque, the philosophy behind them was refreshingly straightforward. Some critics said Kieslowski used his tricks and pretended to be clever when he?s not really so clever. But they didn?t understand Kieslowski?s films. Really they were not sophisticated and that was their strength. They are very simple films dealing with basic truths. Searching for truth was Kieslowski?s obsesion. Sometimes I asked him: ?What do you hate most in all the world?? And he would say: ?Fanatics and fanaticism.? But I think he was a fanatic about truth. For him the purpose and aim of making films was to show truth and search for truth and basic values.

What is the Decalogue about? Krzysztof was asking what these ten simple sentences, the Ten Commandments, mean. He was saying: we should behave according to these basic values which probably exist, maybe it is God himself. If we feel there is something like God, then we have to live according to this knowledge that God exists and demands something from us. He demands love, faith, hope. But for Krzysztof, love was the most important. For him, love was the Eleventh Commandment.

What he most wanted to avoid was being didactic. He never wanted to give solutions to people, to say: if you behave like this you will be rewarded in such and such a way. Absolutely not. In my film about him, he says: ?I don?t know. My profession is not to know.? Not to know but to ask one question after another. He believed that every question asked takes us nearer to truth.