23rd December 2007 ; Screening of 2 Short Films by Krzysztof Kieslowski

TWO SHORT FILMS OF POLISH MASTER
Krzysztof Kieślowski

23^rd December 2007 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

1.

Concert of Requests

‘ Concert of Requests ‘ (Polish : Koncert życzeń ) is a 1967 short film by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and starring Jerzy Fedorowicz, produced while Kieślowski was a student at the Łódź Film School. A rare opportunity to see one of Kieslowski’s first fiction films – his graduation short from the Lodz Film School in Poland (whose students also included Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi) made when he was 26 years old.

The film follows a group of young people on a trip in the forest near Przewoz, Poland. They drink, smoke, listen to rock and roll music, and litter before leaving in a bus. A young man and woman who had been camping leave on a motorcycle. The motorcycle passes the bus on the road, accidentally dropping their tent and the woman's identification card, and the bus stops to pick it up. The motorcyclists drive back to the stopped bus and ask for the tent. The bus driver agrees to return the tent only if the woman comes with them. Ann the story continues .

Concert of Requests is more Godard or Truffaut than Kieslowski - but works either way.

Year : 1968 , Runtime : 16 minutes . Polish with English subtitles.

2.

Dekalog

One of the great achievements in cinema of the last generation, The Decalogue combines tough-minded realism and hallucinatory style.

Dekalog (The Decalogue) (1988) is a Polish film series, originally made as a television miniseries, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and co-written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. It consists of ten one-hour films, each of which represents one of the Ten Commandments and explores possible meanings of the commandment—often ambiguous or contradictory—within a fictional story set in modern Poland. The series is Kieślowski's most acclaimed work and has won numerous international awards, though it was not widely released outside Europe until the late 1990s. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick described it as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime.

Though each film is independent, most of them share the same setting (a large housing project in Warsaw) and some of the characters are acquainted with each other. There is also a nameless character (Artur Barciś), possibly supernatural, who observes the main characters at key moments but never intervenes. The large cast includes both famous actors and unknowns, many of whom Kieślowski also used in other films. Typically for Kieślowski, the tone of most of the films is meditative and melancholy, except for the last one, which (like Three Colors: White, which features two of the same actors) is a black comedy.

The Decalogue films are noted for their tight dramatic constructions, vividly rendered characters, and emotionally resonant ethical dilemmas depicting characters attempting to live in the modern world according to (or in search of) presupposed ideals.

Dekalog 7 ‘ Thou shalt not steal.’

A young woman (Anna Polony) abducts her own child, who has been raised by her parents as her sister. . A six year old blond girl, named Ania (Katarzyna Piwowarczyk), is kidnapped by her sister Majka (Maja Barelkowska), who is really her mother. Ania believes her grandparents, Ewa (Anna Polony) and Stefan (Wladyslaw Kowalski), are her parents, but Majka decides to tell the truth. She takes Aniato her real father, who was her teacher at a boarding school her mot her still runs.

An extremely believable and thoroughly tragic tug-of-war, Dekalog 7 leaves the viewer emotionally stranded, dying to know more.

In Dekalog 7 Kieslowski takes an upsetting and oblique approach to the commandment that "Thou Shalt Not Steal". Rather than confronting the issue head-on with material possessions, he poses the question of whether you can steal something that is already yours, in the process unearthing highly subtle forms of theft.

Year : 1988 , Run time : 55 minutes . Polish with English subtitles.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

b. June 27, 1941, Warsaw, Poland
d. March 13, 1996, Warsaw, Poland

Kieślowski was born in Warsaw and grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. At sixteen, he briefly attended a firemen's training school, but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 .

Leaving college , Kieślowski joined the Łódź Film School, the famed Polish film school that also produced Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda. He attended from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieślowski decided to make documentary films. Kieslowski also married his lifelong love, Maria (Marysia) Cautillo, during his final year in school (m. January 21, 1967 to his death), and they had a daughter, Marta (b. January 8, 1972).

Kieślowski's early documentaries focused on the everyday lives of city dwellers, workers, and soldiers. He soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities. His television film Workers '71, was only shown in a drastically censored form. He abandoned documentary filmmaking due the censorship of Workers '71. He decided that fiction not only allowed more artistic freedom, but could portray everyday life more truthfully.

Kieslowski’s work consists of 40 feature / documentary/ short films made during his short life span which include the evergreen classic Tricolours Trilogy of three films - Red, Blue and White and his 10 parts Dekalog. Series.

The death of Krzysztof Kieslowski in March 1996 was
widely mourned.