CULTURE

...In fact, he credits a "stupid ambition to get in someplace they don't want you" as the reason he became a director in the first place: he was rejected twice when he applied to the prestigious Lodz Film School, before finally being accepted on the third try...

...Switzerland submitted the film, but the Academy's executive committee didn't find it Swiss enough...

...He was filming a documentary called Station, in which he used hidden cameras to capture the everyday life of a train station in Warsaw...

...He later learned that the officers believed he had unknowingly filmed a murder suspect at the exact moment she placed suitcases containing the chopped-up body of her mother into one of the lockers...

...Academy bureaucrats require a foreign film to have a "country of origin," and Red threw them for a loop: its writer/director is Polish, its producer, Marin Karmitz, is French, and it was filmed in Switzerland...

...Blue's depiction of Julie's interior life depends heavily on the lush musical score of long-time Kieslowski collaborator Zbigniew Preisner...

...So the possibility always exists of authors and filmmakers communicating to their audiences apart from the system of censorship...

...Nonetheless, the confiscation affected Kieslowski profoundly...

...What would you most like...

...This moral tiredness is clearly why the judge retired from the bench...

...And what a strange world it is: the judge passes the days by electronically eavesdropping on his neighbor's phone conversations...

...So what we had to do was find solutions for which they didn't have any rules yet____Censorship is like a slalom-ski course...

...Upon returning to the state-run movie studio one night, Kieslowski was met by police, who seized all the footage he had shot at the station that evening...

...they have rules," he explains...

...it is mental movement...

...Yet she's not completely free after all...

...Especially when you know that in 1980, Kieslowski made a documentary called Talking Heads, in which Poles were asked three questions: "When were you born...

...So, after ruling out countries A, B, and C, the Academy simply selected choice D: none of the above...

...Audiences understand the things in a film that censors don't understand," he says...

...Thus, Blue is about, in Kieslowski's words, "the imperfections of human liberty...

...If artistic merit and common sense had any currency in Hollywood, Red would have been the favorite to win this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film...

...Yet what began as a political-survival skill soon began to have profound effects on Kieslowski's aesthetic...

...I do not feel quite comfortable in the world of cinema," he said at a rare U.S...

...He wants nothing to do with all the somebodies who turn the world's wheels...

...In such a climate, is real fraternity possible...

...Although Kieslowski's work is never polemical, it would be wrong to say it is not political...

...In Blue, for example, he says, "I'm talking about an internal liberty...

...It took place a decade and a half ago, when Kieslowski—the acclaimed director of the recent "Three Colors" trilogy, Blue, White, and Red— was still little-known outside his native country...

...Kieslowski's documentary days also put him in some formative battles with bureaucracy—battles he learned how to win...

...Censorship thus forced Kieslowski to learn the purest kind of cinema...

...The harder she attempts to escape, the more she finds herself in a prison of her own making...

...This question, of course, is never addressed directly in the film's dialogue...

...To explore it, Kieslowski set up an unlikely friendship between an idealistic young fashion model (Irene Jacob) and a jaded, retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant...

...As always, Kieslowski leaves his meanings unstated and open-ended, developing the work's "mental movement" through cinematography, editing, and (especially in this film) music...

...Kieslowski, on the other hand, decided that rather than risk co-optation again, he would never make another documentary film...

...Juliette Binoche plays a wealthy Frenchwoman who is trying to make sense of her life after surviving a car wreck that has killed her child and husband, a famous composer (whose work, we discover, may have been written by the widow...

...How far are we really free...

...She moves to a new address without telling anyone and without bringing anything from her old life with her...

...The footage was returned intact and the movie was completed...

...After graduating from the four-year program in 1969, Kieslowski spent several years making documentaries under the auspices of WFD, the state-run film studio...

...To the last question, most responded "freedom...

...When he began directing feature films in 1976, he brought to them a documentary approach: even now, his films are built on ideas instead of action...

...I feel much more comfortable in my own world, which is small but is mine...

...It then made a bad decision worse by refusing to back down, despite an organized protest from prominent American directors and actors, including Robert Altman, Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone...

...Kieslowski has said that, in theory, this auto accident makes the woman, Julie, "completely free," because in an instant she has been relieved of family, love, and obligations...

...The other two countries had already submitted their films...

...When Oscar nominations were handed out in mid-February, the film ended up receiving three of them: Best Cinematography (for director of photography Piotr Sobocinski), Best Original Screenplay (for Kieslowski and longtime co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz), and Best Director...

...But he is accustomed to being an outsider...

...In short, Blue is full of poetry, free of polemics...

...the past remains stubbornly with her...

...I think audiences are as intelligent as me, if not more so," he says...

...It's a world in which, as a running joke in the film goes, "you can buy anything" (including a corpse), a world in which all rules have been crushed by the weight of a giant network of capitalist/criminal enterprises that one character succinctly refers to as "the money business," a world in which "equality" means getting even, a world in which everyone is in it for oneself...

...Cinema is not only physical movement...

...New Yorker critic Anthony Lane has written that "Kieslowski seems to me an exquisitely political artist, precisely because of his refusal to be sententious and his curiosity about everything that eludes political control...

...The results of this approach—most notably in The Decalogue, an epic TV series examining how the themes of the Ten Commandments play out in contemporary life, and The Double Life of Veronique, an ethereal meditation on two women living parallel lives—were a series of layered and lyrical films that eschew the kind of obvious messages and happy endings so adored by Hollywood studios and communist culture ministries alike...

...Kieslowski has said that people are basically good—that evil comes from the fact that, at some point, people realize they are not in a position to bring about good...

...It turned out that Kieslowski's camera missed the gruesome deed...

...He uses his powers (which, it turns out, are sizable, perhaps divine) to manipulate a happy ending—not just for Red, but for the entire trilogy...

...appearance in Boston recently...

...In the prestigious Best Director competition, Kieslowski is the only non-American nominee among a group of Hollywood's biggest hitters: Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Zemeckis...

...the film seems to be about anything but politics, especially Polish politics...

...What are you...

...On this point, it's worth examining the "Three Colors" trilogy, which is based on the themes of the French Revolution as embodied in that country's flag: Blue for liberty, White for equality, Red for fraternity...

...So Julie tries to get rid of that, too...

...When I asked him that at a press conference in Boston, he nodded...

...What the censors didn't understand were, for the most part, things outside of the script: an actor's expression, the framing of a shot, the lighting, the music, the editing...

...Whether Kieslowski himself will likewise return to the fray is one of the most intriguing questions in cinema.* MUes Harvey, the former managing editor of In These Times, is a book critic for Outside...

...It's all in vain...

...Now, as when he gave up documentaries, he seems driven by a determination to not be a cog in the wheel...

...The judge is a particularly interesting figure, because, much like the filmmaker himself, he has given up on society at large, withdrawing into his own little world...

...The snub was especially poignant, given the fact that Red was apparently Kieslowski's final movie...

...In his memoirs, Kieslowski insists that the films have "nothing to do with politics...

...Yet despite such acclaim, Red was not even allowed to be nominated for a foreign-film Oscar...

...She's constantly waiting for something...

...Censors are always just clerks...

...As it turns out, Red's disqualification from the foreign-film category may have been a blessing in disguise, creating sympathy and interest among Academy members...

...Like it or not, independently of my intentions or will, I found myself in the situation of an informer or someone who gives information to the police—which I never wanted to do...

...In his memoirs, Kieslowski could just as well have been speaking for his mother country as for his protagonist when he said, "In a way, Julie's in a static situation...

...It also left him with a lasting faith in moviegoers...

...Is it also at the heart of Kieslowski's decision to leave directing...

...In Red, the judge's friendship with the young woman inspires him to re-enter the world...

...Then he half-whispered in English: "I think I want too much...

...The fifty-three-year-old filmmaker has announced his retirement as a director...

...At first glance, it's hard to argue with him...

...he will henceforth concentrate on writing...

...In Kieslowski's eyes, the seltzer-sipping functionaries of the Motion Picture Academy must look an awful lot like the bullying apparatchiks of the old Polish Communist Party...

...and the National Society of Film Critics...

...All this made me aware again of what a small cog I am in a wheel which is being turned by somebody else for reasons unknown to me, reasons which . . . don't really interest me," he explains in his 1993 memoir Kieslowski on Kieslowski...

...After all, the movie captured comparable honors from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, Miles Harvey, the former managing editor of In These Times, is a book critic for Outside...

...There's the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for instance...

...The music was one of the protagonists...

...One of those cameras was aimed at a row of luggage lockers...

...No one is likely to confiscate Kieslowski's film these days, but his aversion to politics and bureaucracy remains intense...

...So I prefer to have them discover things for themselves and not give them everything on a plate...

...it was very much a main character," says Kieslowski...

...Interestingly enough, a paralyzed post-communist Poland is the backdrop of White...

...Like the central character of Blue, the Polish people are now discovering "the imperfections of human liberty...

...I've got an increasingly strong feeling that all we really care about is ourselves," Kieslowski observes in his memoirs...

...That's one of the central questions of Red, the final film of the trilogy...

...Yet whether the director likes it or not, it's hard not to also view the film as a political allegory...

...Other directors might have brooded and then gone on with their careers...

...The censors learned to set up the gates better and better, and we learned to ski better and better...