Filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screen giant reportedly was ready to end 'retirement'

Michael Wilmington
Movie Critic
Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1996
Tribune wire services contributed to this report.

Not many contemporary filmmakers could reasonably aspire to the title of "conscience of their 
times." But Poland's Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died of a heart attack Wednesday morning at 
age 54 came as close as any.

Mr. Kieslowski's films-the 13 features, 23 documentary shorts and 2 multipart works that had 
earned him a frequent recent accolade as "the greatest living filmmaker"--were never made 
purely to entertain.

They always were meant to instruct and inform, to move and inspire, to provoke and disturb.  
And they do.  They sear themselves into your mind.

Best known in America for the "Three Colors: Blue, White, Red" trilogy-shot in France, Poland 
and Switzerland with a multinational cast and crew-Mr. Kieslowski had announced his 
retirement in 1994.  It's safe to say many of his international fans chose to disbelieve him. (And, 
in fact, his longtime composer, Zbigniew Preisner, said that recently the director had begun 
discussing future projects again.

But Mr. Kieslowski, a heavy cigarette smoker, was felled by a heart attack last August.  He then 
underwent bypass surgery Tuesday, before Wednesday's fatal attack.

He died in a Warsaw hospital.  'He is survived by his wife, Maria, his daughter, Marta - and a 
legion of admirers around the -world.

It was, as countryman Roman Polanski said Wednesday, "a great loss for cinema." Kieslowski 
directed movies, like 1979's "Camera Buff," 1981's "Blind Chance" or 1984's "No End," confront 
moral problems in modern society more intensely than the films of any of his colleagues - 
including the rest of the young Polish cineastes grouped with him as creators of that country's 
1970s' "Cinema of Moral Unrest."

A consistent critic of the social breakdowns of Poland's old communist regime, Mr. Kieslowski 
often had to veil his critiques, facing censorship if he slipped.  But he was not notably more 
partial to the West.  And, when he retired from filmmaking after his superb 1993-94 "Three 
Colors: Red, White, Blue," it was perhaps because he felt comfortable in neither of the worlds he 
was trapped between.

Was he the greatest living filmmaker until Wednesday morning?  Not necessarily.  Ingmar 
Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrzej Wajda, Stanley 
Kubrick and Martin Scorsese are all still alive, most of them still working.  But the fact that Mr. 
Kieslowski could be described that way-seen as winning the laurels once held by a Bergman, 
Jean Renoir or Orson Welles - shows how badly critics felt his kind of filmmaking was needed, 
what a gap he filled.

His masterpiece, easily one of the century's greatest films, remains "The Decalogue": the 10-hour 
work he shot for Polish TV in 1988-89.  Consisting of 10 episodes-each set in the same Warsaw 
apartment complex and each based on one of the 10 Commandments-it was co-written, as were 
most of Mr. Kieslowski's late features, by author-lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz.

And it shows, as nowhere else in Mr. Kieslowski's work, the depth of his disquiet, the strength of 
his conviction.  Ironically, "The Decalogue," tied up in a distribution tangle for years, is having 
its Chicago theatrical premiere next week - Friday, March 22 - at Facets Multimedia.

But it remains the magnificent testament of a fearless, stubborn and brilliant maker of films.