Krzysztof Kieślowski
[[pl:Krzysztof Kie%B6lowski]]
Krzysztof Kieślowski (June 27, 1941 - March 13, 1996) was an influential Polish film director and screenwriter.
Krzysztof Kieslowski was born in Warsaw, Poland. Later he studied at Lodz Film School (1964-1968). After graduating in 1968, he successfully took up making documentary films. His first feature film, Personnel (1975), was made for television and won him 1st Prize at the Mannheim Film Festival. Living under the oppression of a Communist dictatorship, his films were commentaries on the social problems at the time. After the fall of communism, he would become one of the leading filmmakers in Europe.
His 1988 The Decalogue, a series of ten short films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments and set in modern Warsaw, was created for Polish television and was rarely seen elsewhere until many years later, but is now one of the most highly critically acclaimed film cycles of all time. Kieslowski later remade two of these segments as longer feature films, A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing.
Kieslowski's last four and most commercially successful films were his only foreign productions, filmed in France, Switzerland, and Poland. These were less overtly political works, focusing on moral and metaphysical issues. The first of these was La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique) (1990), starring Irene Jacob. This was followed by the trilogy Three Colors (Blue, White, Red), his most acclaimed works next to The Decalogue and his first international commercial successes.
Starting with the film No End (1984), Kieslowski's career was closely associated with two frequent collaborators, the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner. Piesiewicz was a trial lawyer whom Kieslowski met while researching political trials in Poland for No End; he co-wrote all of Kieslowski's subsequent films. Preisner provided the musical score for No End and most of the subsequent films, sometimes posing as his fictional alter ego van den Budenmayer.
In 1993, Kieslowski published an autobiography, Kieslowski on Kieslowski, based on interviews by Danusia Stok. He is also the subject of a biographical film, Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-So (1995), directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki.
Krzysztof Kieslowski died on March 13, 1996 from a heart attack and was interred in Powazki Cemetery, Warsaw, Poland. Situation of his grave: on entering by the main entrance turn right and you will see his grave a short distance in, off the path to the right (very close to the perimeter wall). The grave has a sculpture of the thumb and forefingers of two hands forming an oblong—the classic view as if through a movie camera.
The small sculpture is in black marble on a pedestal slightly over a meter tall. The slab with Kieslowski's name and dates lies below.
Years after his death, he remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works the study of film classes at universities throughout the world.
Though he had claimed to be retiring after Three Colors, at the time of his death Kieslowski was working on a new trilogy co-written with Piesewicz, consisting of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. The only completed screenplay, Heaven, was filmed by Tom Tykwer and released in 2002 at the Toronto Film Festival.