Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes..
Krzysztof Kieślowski (27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996) was a Polish film director and screenwriter. He is known internationally for Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and the Three Colours trilogy (1993–1994)
Krzysztof Kieslowski graduated from Lódz Film School in 1969, and became a documentary, TV and feature film director and scriptwriter.
Mr. Kieslowski started his career shooting documentaries and later became associated with the “cinema of moral anxiety” movement. It grouped several Polish directors, including Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and aimed at depicting the conditions of Poles under communism. His best known work was the Three Colors trilogy: Üç Renk: Kırmızı (1994), Üç Renk: Beyaz (1994) and Üç Renk: Mavi (1993).
Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes
There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.
I am trained as a film-maker. There is nothing else I can do.
I have no problem being with people of different nationalities.
I have no problem being with people of different nationalities.
In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
Of course I’d like to get beyond the concrete. But it’s really difficult. Very difficult.
It’s not interesting to achieve; the ways of achievement are interesting.
Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?
I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.
Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes
In real life, there are names that surprise us because they don’t seem to suit the person at all.
We’re always looking at this love through the eyes of the person who is suffering because of this love.
Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.
“That’s the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.”
I like chance meetings – life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.
What do I want? Calmness. You can only aspire to it. The path is interesting. Who am I? A retired film director. That’s the truth now.
I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.”
I have one good characteristic: I’m a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst – always. To me, the future is a black hole.
Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes
I really don’t know anything about music, and it’s no great experience for me. But I do think that music has a purifying element.
For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise – whatever appeals to you.
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator’s memory.
If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I’ll never achieve it; in the same way that I’ll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.
The television industry doesn’t like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that’s black; this is good, that’s bad.
Things have changed for the worse. That’s why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them – which sometimes happened.
If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I’ll never achieve it; in the same way that I’ll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.
“I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn’t really know why they were living.”
Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes
I feel Polish. More specifically, I feel like I’m from the tiny village in the Northeast of Poland where I have a house and where I love to spend time. But I don’t work there. I cut wood.
“In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words – liberty, equality, and fraternity – do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.”
It’s with pleasure that I’m putting film-making aside. I never enjoyed making films. I didn’t like the whole film world – an invented, unreal world whose values are completely different to those I’m used to.
[on Ingmar Bergman]: I can identify with what Bergman says about life, about what he says about love. I identify more or less with his attitude towards the world… towards men and women and what we do in everyday life… forgetting about what is most important.
Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It’s an obsession of mine: that different people in different places are thinking the same thing but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.
Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It’s an obsession of mine, that different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing, but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.
To tell you the truth, in my work, love is always in opposition to the elements. It creates dilemmas. It brings in suffering. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it. You’ll rarely find a happy ending in my work.
[on his retirement from filmmaking] From time to time one ought to look objectively at life. When you achieve something, you don’t actually realize you’ve achieved anything. It’s only afterwards when you’ve lost it that you realize you’ve lost it.
I was happy when I got in to film school. I’d simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in – nothing else – although I do believe they shouldn’t have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can’t understand why they took me. Probably because I’d tried three times
I was happy when I got into film school. I’d simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in – nothing else – although I do believe they shouldn’t have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can’t understand why they took me. Probably because I’d tried three times.
“This, among other things, is where the magic of the screen lies: that suddenly, as an audience, you find yourself in a state of tension because you’re in a world shown to you by the director. That world is so coherent, so comprehensive, so succinct that you’re transported into it and experience tension because you sense the tension between the characters.”
[on Andrei Tarkovsky]: Andrey Tarkovsky was one of the greatest directors of recent years. He’s dead, like most of them. That is, most of them are dead or have stopped making films. Or else, somewhere along the way they’ve irretrievably lost something, some individual sort of imagination, intelligence, or way of narrating a story. Tarkovsky was certainly one of those who hadn’t lost this.
I like chance meetings – life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know. At this moment, in this café, we’re sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go on their own way. And they’ll never meet again. And if they do, they won’t realise that it’s not for the first time.
[on Trois couleurs: Blanc (1994)] Warsaw is my city. One of the themes of the film is what’s good about Warsaw – there’s an impatience, an aggressive desire to become rich, to win at all costs, to obtain material possessions. Warsaw is where you can see this most clearly. There it’s like a whirlwind. The air buzzes and people buzz with these desires.
“Do you think Western Civilization has come to an end?
“We are clearly going through a cultural crisis at the moment. It’s a phase where we are trying to distinguish values of life. People are looking for a solution and perhaps they will find it. But the radicality of the search will change their view of life.”
So there is a cultural crises?
“There is a general crisis, but it’s not the end of the world.
But the crisis it total?
“And so what? The crisis means that now the world is at the bottom of a sinus curve. In the nature of things, it will now rise and fall again later.”
If there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn’t matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it’s still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word “love” has the same meaning for everybody. Or “fear”, or “suffering”. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That’s why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.
Krzysztof Kieślowski Quotes
