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Reviews
Imperativ (1982)
Looking for a way out of disturbing philosophical questions.
A film that goes straight to the heart of philosophy by asking and sort of answering the most basic questions we all encounter during our lifetimes. Is there meaning to life? Just climb out the window across the roof half naked and see if there is. Is there a God? Just go to an abandoned Synagogue and tick on the zinc of the altar and see what happens. What happens is that you cut off the tip of the finger yourself that you used to tick on the zinc. Is there life after death? The professor you sent tapes to, to tell him the questions you had, who has now died, go to his grave and ask him this last question in person, to send a signal if there is life after death. Snow slides down from the roof of the Maria statue next to the grave. All is in black and white but at the end, it is mid winter and the trees are all bare and black, between them there is blue like you had not seen it before. His hand bandaged, we feel things are mending again. But all is not what it seems and he tells his girlfriend "perhaps the truck that will run us over, is now tanking 100 meters from here". Has he lost his mind? No he had to become hyper realistic to regain his mental health, I think is what the film is saying. But the raven at the end makes you think twice. Zanussi is Polish and Poland still has some very hard questions to answer, after furnishing the Shoah during WWII, from a Christian view. No film has made such a deep impression on me, describing it now 30 years later.
Trois couleurs: Rouge (1994)
Rouge: the product of a religious and synthetic Polish mind
I believe I share the same psychological outlook on the world with Kieslowski. He is Polish, I am Dutch, yet we share a synthetic mind: the world is not void of the metaphysical amidst total coincidence. Hardly ruled by man or perhaps by a poet-prime minister, so that as a social and cultural 'low pressure area', Poland could play the role it did in WWII, being critical yet Christian towards the Jews but often not less critical toward oneself. There are innocence and guilt in Kieslowski's world view, as the symbols in Catholicism: the White versus the Black Madonna. In Rouge, the Black Madonna is she who the judge fell in love with when he was a young man. Flashbacks are magically-realistically intertwined with the present, although totally coincidental, such as the camera simply swinging to the other side of the street or the then young judge's red jeep passing by the now young woman's car after she accidentally hit his dog with it. That we leaped through time in those same camera moves, is what we grasp later. His love was unanswered, so that his life wasn't as he had planned it. He lost his ability to love other people and animals. Being a judge, he feels he is actually spying on other peoples' lives and when he retires, he simply continues to do so, spying on his neighbors this time. The innocence and sense of righteousness of the younger woman (literally) accidentally getting into his life, reinstalls his better judgment and it is because of her that he spontaneously confesses his spying behavior to his neighbors and the police, accepting and even holding on to the stones consequentially thrown through his windows. In the process, history repeats itself between this man and the woman he loves, although this time he is old and the woman not the same. Kieslowski may have wrestled with this bit for the old judge is his alter ego, and it is said he was infatuated by Irène Jacob. Both women play the same essential role in his psychology, of the one (!) who possesses his heart and soul and therefore can make him or break him, even as an old man! It is as if the 'powers in the air' are, or God is, bringing them together. Coincidences are *too* coincidental to just be chance or even good luck. There has to be some mystical, supernatural or theological source influencing these unfathomably deep life-decisions. The study book fell and opened at the page of the exam question is another example of this. Or the moment the old judge spoke his heart to the young woman, the wind outside the opera house suddenly slams the open doors and breaks the windows. The gigantic picture of the young woman happens to predict the one on TV, after the drowning accident on her Canal crossing trip. These moments are effectively accentuated through the human voice of liturgy or what sounds like it (Van den Budenmayer).