Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing at Cinema du Parc

As part of Cinema du Parc's series on Masterpieces of Polish Cinema (presented by Martin Scorsese) this week, I was happy to see that A Short Film About Killing was on their playlist for this weekend. This is one of Kieslowski's early feature films and one that came directly out of his earlier made-for-TV masterpiece, Dekalog.

Dekalog is a series of ten short films (one hour each) that aired in Polish TV in the mid 80s and A Short Film About Killing was originally one of these short episodes that Kieslowski expanded into a full-length film.

I've for years wished that some repertory cinema in Montreal would play Dekalog in its entirety and I've only ever seen in on DVD but the premise is basically that each film is "about" or inspired by one of the ten commandments. So there's a film that alludes to Thou shall not commit adultery and one about Honoring thy father and mother, etc.

The films aren't meant to be explicit treatises on the Ten Commandments and the allusions to them are sometimes obscure or oblique. But it's an excellent series of films and an incredibly interesting time capsule into life in Poland in the 1980s.

I was really happy to see that the Cinema du Parc was fairly full this afternoon when I walked over to CdP (in a blizzard no less) to check out A Short Film About Killing.

The film is constructed in two parts: the first leading up to the random killing of a taxi driver by

Jacek, an aimless street criminal who seems to kill just for the thrill of it. But there are no easy answers: the taxi driver is a bit of a prick and Jacek, too, we learn later, has overcome a major tragedy in his own life. The second act leads up to Jacek's execution by the Polish state but what is not there is just as important as what is: there is no arrest, no investigation, not even any courtroom scenes (though the judge alludes to the defense attorney's speech against the evils of capital punishment, we never see the attorney - his name is Piotr - in action). This act opens with the judge ruling against Piotr and Jacek which starts the ball rolling on his execution. We see the cruelty of state-sanctioned execution but it's not done in any pat or superficial way: one killing leads to another but both are horrific and both are meant to be seen as equally abhorrent. And though there is certainly a political message here, how it's told is just as important as what the message is meant to convey. It's beautifully filmed and I'm so fascinated by these images of Poland in the mid-80s.

Speaking of Kieslowski, I really enjoyed reading Teju Cole's piece in the New Yorker about the director's last film, Red. Though I've always been more partial to Blue, I do find Red one of Kieslowski's most watchable and interesting films.

One of my most favorite all time movies is a Kieslowski movie, The Double Life of Veronica, and I've seen it probably 15 times. But I still get something new out of it every time I watch it and all of Kieslowski's films are at the top of my Criterion wish list (along with Wong Kar wai's In the Mood for Love). I, like Cole, discovered Kieslowski in my early 20s when Red was released and with a bunch of friends I saw a triple feature at the U-District Theatre in Seattle back in like 1994.  I've gone back to all of his films many times in my life and, to me, these films are what cinema is all about.

A Short Film About Killing plays again Monday, February 9 at 7pm at Cinema du Parc so I'd highly recommend it to any fans of "good" films and, of course, to anyone to admires the films of Kieslowski. Maybe CdP will get around to playing Dekalog one of these days or the entire Three Colors series. I hope so.

Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski

Summer is my chance to see movies which I often can't during the year and yesterday I saw Ida. A fascinating little gem of a movie.

The film is set in 1961 in Poland and tells the story of a Anna, a young would-be nun who is told that her aunt, after many years of silence, has asked to meet her. The girl is an orphan, we are told, but we know nothing about her past or circumstances that have brought her to be raised in the convent. She has never left since arriving as an infant. She doesn't want to leave to meet her aunt but the mother superior insists.

Thus begins an odd little romp: one part personal journey, one part road-movie, one part historical exploration. Her aunt is a deeply troubled woman and tells Anna almost immediately that her name is Ida and that she is Jewish. Anna has no reaction to this and the tense first few moments of the encounter with her hung-over, half-dressed 40-something year old aunt ends with her deciding to go back to the convent, to end this solitary life adventure.

But sitting in the train station, the aunt's heart softens (we see an earlier shot of her in her capacity as a judge, mindlessly watching a trial that has to do with one neighbor cutting another's hedges and how this represents non-socialist behavior, etc.) and she and Ida return to her house. The stark shots, the austere background noises: all of that remains the same but the film warms up almost immediately and the two set out to find the bodies of Anna's parents (and Wanda's sister).

It's not useful to explain more of what happens because it gets at the heart of why the movie is so interesting but it involves a road trip and a young handsome saxophone player in a nightclub.

This leads me to one of the most interesting things about the movie: the music. Most of it is incidental (characters playing records or musicians playing on-stage in a bar) and there are only a few scenes with actual background music. Other than that, silence permeates this film. Not only silence from music but not as much dialogue as one might expect.

I kept thinking of Kieslowski while watching this. Not that Pawlikowski is a similar type of story-teller. In fact, they are radically different kinds of story tellers and the only thing that they have in common is their (often) bleak settings and the fact that they are both Polish. Kieslowski uses music in (at times) manipulative ways, appealing to our emotional lives less than to our intellectual ones.

But I appreciated Pawlikowski's vision a great deal. It's not a flashy film; it's very, very understated and he allows his viewers to be intelligent and sophisticated without handing them pat little morals or emotions on a platter. Because there are no answers: the past is our constant companion. Whereas Kieslowski was interested in the ways we find identity and then locate the bonds which connect us to one another, Pawlikowski is interested in how we live within the framework of the past, putting its painful episodes away or letting them overpower us.

Ida is playing at Cinema du Parc  (with English subtitles) and at Excentris (with French subtitles) all week.

German Crime Series: screening at the Goethe Institute

Thursday night (tomorrow, the 8th of November) at the new Goethe Institute in Montreal (St-Laurent and Ontario, just a block north of St-Laurent metro station) there will be a screening of a German television series that caused quite a sensation when it was screened in Germany as part of the Berlin Film Festival a couple of years ago. The series is comprised of 10 episodes and entitled In the Face of Crime (Im Angesicht des Verbrechens). Many critics called it a masterpiece though the director's name, Dominik Graf, isn't widely known outside of Germany. According to several articles and critics' responses (including this one here) that's largely because Graf writes for television which naturally has a much smaller international audience and often falls off the circuit for international film festival screenings.

But let's not forget that even cinematic geniuses like Kieslowski started on television (if you haven't seen his 10 episode series, The Decalogue, made for Polish television in the 1980s, you are missing out!) and today the talk around the water cooler is much more often around television than it is about movies. (I'm always amazed at how much of my conversations with friends relates to TV when almost none of us actually watch television shows on TV but instead on DVD or Netflix or iTunes or the PC: talking about Breaking Bad,  Downton Abbey, The Big C, Weeds, Treme, The Wire, etc., etc.).

As I noted earlier this week, it used to be that television was looked down upon and I remember when I was an undergraduate, there were no television shows that were considered even halfway decent for polite society! Nowadays television is, by and large, much more interesting and engaging than big American movies.

Be all that as it may, In the Face of Crime, the German series, shows the lives and work of two Berlin police officers as they navigate the German underworld, spotlighting Russian gangs, sex trafficking and other issues major urban centres around the world are forced to deal with today. I've not seen it but definitely going to go check it out.

It plays Thursday and Friday nights at the Goethe Institute in downtown Montreal. It's $3 to get in (free to friends of the Instiute) and each episode is about one hour long (so two episodes per evening). The screening is in German with English subtitles. Bring some friends. Might be a new show to discuss around the water cooler!