The Principle
Krzysztof Kieslowski made films about the moments when ordinary people collide with moral questions too large for their lives. A woman decides whether to keep her dead husband's musical composition or destroy it. A man watches a stranger through a telescope and falls into something adjacent to love. A retired judge eavesdrops on his neighbors' phone calls and must reckon with the implications of everything he has heard. These are not dramatic premises in the conventional sense — they are ethical labyrinths, situations in which every path forward involves some form of loss, compromise, or self-betrayal. Kieslowski's genius was to film these labyrinths not as intellectual exercises but as experiences felt in the body, registered in the play of light on a face, in the hesitation before a word is spoken, in the way a hand reaches for an object and then withdraws.
What distinguishes Kieslowski from other filmmakers who deal in moral complexity is his absolute refusal to judge. In A Short Film About Killing, we follow a young drifter as he commits a brutal, senseless murder — and then we follow the legal system as it executes him with equal brutality, equal senselessness. Kieslowski does not tell us which killing is worse. He shows us both and leaves us in the space between, where morality becomes not a set of principles but a wound that will not close. This is the Kieslowski method: present the dilemma with total clarity, deny the audience any comfortable position from which to observe it, and trust that the resulting discomfort is itself a form of moral education.
The connecting thread — the mysterious link between lives that do not know they are linked — is Kieslowski's deepest preoccupation. In The Double Life of Veronique, two women in different countries share a face, a talent for singing, and a cardiac condition, yet never meet except in a single fleeting glimpse. In Three Colors: Red, a young model's life intersects with a retired judge's in patterns that suggest design without a designer. Throughout The Decalogue, characters from one episode appear briefly in the background of another, living their separate crises in the same Warsaw housing complex. Kieslowski understood that we are all participants in a story whose full shape we cannot see, and that cinema — with its ability to move between perspectives, to show simultaneity and connection — is uniquely equipped to reveal the hidden architecture of human lives.
Moral Architecture: The Ethical Labyrinth
The Dilemma Without Resolution
Every Kieslowski film is constructed around a moral dilemma that admits no clean solution. In Decalogue I, a father's rational faith in mathematics and technology is shattered when the ice he calculated to be safe gives way beneath his son. In Decalogue V (expanded as A Short Film About Killing), the moral horror of murder is set against the moral horror of state execution, and neither cancels the other. In Three Colors: Blue, Julie's attempt to free herself from all emotional attachment after her husband and daughter's death is simultaneously an act of self-preservation and an act of self-destruction. Kieslowski never simplifies these dilemmas into problems with solutions. They are conditions of existence — permanent, irreducible, and generative of the deepest human responses.
The power of this approach lies in its demand upon the audience. When there is no right answer, the viewer cannot sit passively and wait to be told what to think. They must inhabit the dilemma themselves, feel its weight, and accept that moral life is not about arriving at correct positions but about remaining open to the full complexity of each situation. Kieslowski trusted his audiences to do this work, and his reward was a body of films that grow richer with every viewing because they never foreclose interpretation.
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Choices
Kieslowski's characters are never heroes, intellectuals, or exceptional figures. They are hairdressers, judges, music students, taxi drivers, postal workers. Their ordinariness is essential. When Julie in Blue sits in a cafe and watches a sugar cube absorb coffee, the gesture carries the weight of an entire philosophy of grief precisely because Julie is not a philosopher but a woman performing a small, unconscious act while her world collapses. Kieslowski found the universal in the specific, the metaphysical in the mundane. His characters do not represent ideas — they are people who happen to find themselves at the intersection of forces larger than their understanding.
The Witness
A recurring figure in Kieslowski's work is the witness — someone who observes but does not or cannot intervene. In The Decalogue, a mysterious young man appears at the edges of multiple episodes, watching the characters with an expression that might be compassion, might be helplessness, might be something beyond human emotion entirely. He watches as the father in Decalogue I loses his son. He watches as the murderer in Decalogue V is led to execution. He never speaks, never acts. His presence suggests that every moral crisis is observed by a consciousness beyond our own — not necessarily God, but something attentive. This figure is Kieslowski's most mysterious creation, and the fact that he never explains it is central to its power.
The Visual Language of Connection
Color as Philosophical Structure
In the Three Colors trilogy, Kieslowski uses the colors of the French flag — blue, white, red — as both organizing principles and emotional atmospheres. Blue, corresponding to liberty, saturates the film with blue light, blue objects, blue reflections, as Julie attempts to free herself from all bonds of love and memory. White, corresponding to equality, drains the image of warmth and saturation as Karol navigates the cold landscapes of post-communist Poland. Red, corresponding to fraternity, bathes the film in warm reds as Valentine and the Judge move toward a connection that defies logic and time.
But the colors are never merely symbolic. They operate on a sensory level before they operate on an intellectual one. The blue light that fills Julie's swimming pool sequences in Blue is beautiful before it is meaningful — it creates a visual experience of submersion, of being inside grief, of the world reduced to a single overwhelming hue. Kieslowski understood that color in cinema works first on the body and only secondarily on the mind.
Close-Ups and Macro Detail
Kieslowski's camera is drawn to extreme close-ups of small objects and gestures: a sugar cube dissolving in coffee, a finger running along a stone wall, a thread pulled from a fabric, a coin spinning on a countertop. These macro details are not merely visual texture — they are the film's philosophy made visible. In Kieslowski's world, the smallest gestures contain the largest meanings. A hand touching a surface is an act of connection with the material world. A sugar cube dissolving is entropy, loss, transformation — the entire human condition compressed into a moment of casual observation.
The close-up of the human eye — particularly the eye reflecting light, or the eye on the verge of tears that do not fall — is perhaps Kieslowski's most characteristic image. The eye is simultaneously the organ of perception and the window to interiority. When Kieslowski holds on an eye, he places us at the exact boundary between the outer world and the inner one, between what is seen and what is felt.
The Fleeting Glimpse
One of Kieslowski's most distinctive techniques is the fleeting glimpse — the moment when a character sees something at the edge of their vision that they cannot quite identify or understand. In The Double Life of Veronique, Weronika glimpses Veronique on a tourist bus in Krakow, seeing her own face reflected back at her from another life. The moment lasts only seconds, but it reverberates through the entire film. In Red, Valentine catches sight of a man who seems to be a younger version of the Judge. These glimpses suggest a hidden order beneath the surface of ordinary life — connections that exist but cannot be grasped, meanings that shimmer at the periphery of consciousness and then disappear.
Sound and Music: Preisner's Invisible Voice
The Preisner Partnership
Zbigniew Preisner's scores for Kieslowski's films are not accompaniments but essential structural elements. The "Song for the Unification of Europe" in Blue — attributed to the fictional composer Van den Budenmayer — becomes the film's central dramatic object, the composition that Julie must decide whether to complete or destroy. The score for The Double Life of Veronique, with its soaring soprano and aching strings, expresses the connection between the two women more eloquently than any dialogue could. Preisner's music operates in the space between characters, making audible the invisible threads that connect them.
The key to Preisner's work with Kieslowski is restraint. The music appears sparingly, and when it arrives, it arrives with the force of revelation. In Blue, the recurring musical motif crashes into Julie's consciousness — and ours — at unpredictable intervals, accompanied by a brief fade to black, as if grief itself were a musical event that interrupts the flow of daily life. The music does not comment on the emotion of a scene; it is the emotion, erupting from beneath the surface of composed behavior.
The Van den Budenmayer Device
Kieslowski and Preisner invented a fictional Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer, whose work appears across multiple films. This fictional attribution serves a philosophical purpose: it creates the sense of a musical tradition that exists independently of any single film, a body of work that, like Kieslowski's characters, participates in a pattern larger than itself. When Van den Budenmayer's music appears in both The Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy, it suggests that these separate stories share a common spiritual substrate — that they are all, in some sense, listening to the same music.
Silence and Ambient Sound
Between Preisner's musical interventions, Kieslowski's films are remarkably quiet. The sound design favors naturalistic ambience — traffic, rain, footsteps, the hum of appliances — with an attentiveness that elevates the ordinary into the contemplative. In Blue, the sound of Julie's fist scraping along a stone wall is as carefully designed as any musical passage. In Red, the sound of telephone connections — clicks, hums, the electronic pulse of voices traveling through wire — becomes a sonic metaphor for the invisible connections between human beings.
Narrative Structure: Parallel Lives, Converging Paths
The Multi-Strand Narrative
Kieslowski pioneered a form of narrative structure in which multiple storylines run in parallel, connected by theme, geography, or invisible threads of causation. The Decalogue tells ten separate stories set in the same Warsaw housing complex, each loosely inspired by one of the Ten Commandments. The Three Colors trilogy follows three separate protagonists in three different countries, connected by the French tricolor and by a shared shipwreck in the final moments of Red. In Blind Chance, three different versions of a man's life unfold from a single moment — whether he catches a train, misses it, or is delayed.
This structure reflects Kieslowski's understanding of human existence as fundamentally interconnected. We do not live in isolation. Our choices ripple outward, affecting lives we will never know. The stranger in the background of your life may be living a crisis as profound as your own. Cinema's ability to move between perspectives — to show what no single character can see — makes it the ideal medium for revealing these connections.
Chance and Design
Kieslowski's narratives are constructed around moments of chance — a coin flip, a missed phone call, a traffic jam, a dropped ring — that alter the entire trajectory of a life. But these chance events are filmed with such precision and embedded in such carefully constructed patterns of visual and thematic rhyme that they begin to feel like design. Is it accident or fate that Valentine and the Judge find each other? Is it chance or providence that Veronique dies and Weronika lives? Kieslowski refused to answer these questions, but he posed them with such rigor that the audience cannot avoid confronting them.
The Penultimate Scene
Kieslowski had a distinctive structural habit: the penultimate scene of his films often contains the emotional and philosophical climax, while the final scene offers a coda that reframes everything that came before. In Red, the shipwreck and rescue of the trilogy's protagonists is the climax; the final image of Valentine's face is the coda. In Blue, Julie's decision to complete the concerto is the climax; the montage of connected characters seen through blue-tinted glass is the coda. This structure leaves the audience with an image rather than a resolution — a face, a color, a gesture that continues to resonate after the film has ended.
The Kieslowski Frame: Cinematography and Composition
Slawomir Idziak and the Filtered Image
Kieslowski worked with several brilliant cinematographers, but his collaboration with Slawomir Idziak (A Short Film About Killing, The Double Life of Veronique, Blue) produced his most distinctive visual style. Idziak used specially designed filters to alter the color temperature and texture of the image, creating a look that is simultaneously naturalistic and uncanny. In A Short Film About Killing, green and yellow filters drain the Warsaw landscape of warmth, creating a sickly, oppressive atmosphere. In Blue, the image shifts between cool blue tones and warmer registers as Julie moves between grief and engagement with the world.
Windows, Glass, and Reflections
Kieslowski's compositions frequently employ windows, glass, and reflective surfaces as framing devices. Characters are seen through glass, reflected in mirrors, doubled in windows. This visual strategy serves multiple purposes: it creates layers of depth within the frame, it suggests the barrier between inner and outer worlds, and it visualizes the theme of doubling and connection that runs through all of Kieslowski's work. In The Double Life of Veronique, the image is frequently shot through glass or water, creating a shimmering, unstable visual surface that mirrors the film's metaphysical uncertainty.
Writing/Directing Specifications
- Construct every narrative around a moral dilemma that has no clean resolution. The central conflict should be one in which every choice involves genuine loss. The audience should be unable to identify a "right" answer without suppressing part of the truth. The dilemma should feel like a wound that the film keeps open rather than a problem it solves.
- Use color as both emotional atmosphere and philosophical structure. Assign a dominant color palette to each major thematic strand or character, but allow the color to work on a sensory level before an intellectual one. The audience should feel the color in their body — as warmth, coldness, immersion, distance — before they decode its symbolic meaning.
- Film extreme close-ups of small objects and gestures as philosophical events. A sugar cube dissolving, a thread pulling loose, a coin spinning, a finger tracing a surface — these micro-events should be filmed with the same gravity as dramatic climaxes. In the Kieslowski method, the smallest physical detail contains the largest metaphysical truth.
- Score the film with restraint, allowing music to arrive as revelation rather than accompaniment. Musical passages should be separated by stretches of naturalistic silence and ambient sound. When the score enters, it should feel like a door opening between worlds — an eruption of feeling that the characters and the audience have been holding beneath the surface.
- Build connections between characters who do not know they are connected. Use visual rhyme, geographic proximity, and narrative coincidence to suggest an architecture of human connection that no single character can perceive. Let the audience see the pattern that the characters cannot. This is cinema's unique moral gift: the God's-eye view of human interconnection.
- Include a witness figure who observes but does not intervene. This may be a literal character — a mysterious observer in the background — or a structural position created by the camera itself. The presence of the witness suggests that every human crisis is seen, that we are not alone in our moral struggles, even if the witnessing presence offers no help and no answers.
- Use glass, windows, and reflective surfaces as compositional elements in at least one-third of all shots. Characters should be seen through barriers, reflected in surfaces, doubled and layered within the frame. These visual strategies create a cinema of transparency and opacity, of connection and separation, in which the boundary between self and other, inner and outer, is perpetually visible.
- Construct narratives with parallel timelines or parallel lives that converge at unexpected points. The structural principle is simultaneity: while one character suffers, another across the city or across the world experiences a connected joy or pain. The convergence should feel like both accident and design, leaving the question of fate versus chance permanently unresolved.
- Direct performances toward understatement and interior stillness. Actors should convey emotion through restraint — a held breath, a slight shift of gaze, a hand that reaches for something and then stops. The greatest emotional moments in a Kieslowski film happen in the silences between words, in the micro-expressions that cross a face before composure is restored.
- End the film with a face. The final image should be a close-up of a human face — not in the middle of action or dialogue, but in a moment of stillness, looking at something we cannot see, experiencing something we can only guess at. The face should be the film's final question, not its answer. Hold the shot long enough for the audience to study the face as they would study a painting, and then cut to black.