Tag Archives: Three Colors trilogy

cinephiliabeyond:

Krzysztof Kieślowski photographed by Piotr Jaxa during the making of the Three Colors trilogy, courtesy of strangewood. Following his photographic collaboration with Kieślowski on the set of the film trilogy Blue, White and Red, he prepared an exhibition entitled Remembering Krzysztof  which has been touring the world since 1994.

Our friends at Mentorless, a brilliant site for independent storytellers and filmmakers, have posted extracts from Dominique Rabourdin‘s Cinema Lessons with Krzysztof Kieślowski. Each video focuses on one specific aspect of one of the trilogy’s films and Kieślowski deconstructs for us the thinking behind his choices. A truly fascinating window into a filmmaker’s mind.

• LESSON #1: MEANING AND USE OF A CLOSE-UP IN TROIS COULEURS BLEU

After showing a brief sequence from Trois Couleurs: Bleu, with Juliette Binoche, Krzysztof Kieślowski explains why he decided to insert what can seem like an ordinary shot: the close up of a sugar cube getting soaked with coffee.

This is a sugar cube about to fall in the cup of coffee. What does this obsession with close-ups mean? Simply that we’re trying to show the heroine’s world from her point of view, to show that she sees these little things, things that are near her, by focusing on them, in order to demonstrate that the rest doesn’t matter to her. She’s trying to contain, to put a lid on her world and on her immediate environment. There are a few details like this in the movie. We made a very tight shot of the sugar cube sucking up the coffee to show that nothing around her matters to her, not other people, not their business, nor the boy, the man who loves her and went through a great ordeal to find her. She just doesn’t care. Only the sugar cube matters, and she intentionally focuses on it to shut out all the things she doesn’t accept.

• LESSON #2: BUILDING AN OPENING SEQUENCE IN TROIS COULEURS BLANC

In this video, Kieślowski explains how and why he changed the opening scene of White and deciding to intercut X and Y elements and create homogeneity with the three opening of his trilogy:

• LESSON #3: DROPPING CLUES FOR THE AUDIENCE IN TROIS COULEURS ROUGE

In the final video, dedicated to Red, the last film of the trilogy, Krzysztof Kieślowski explains how he dropped clues for the audience, that might or might not accumulate in the viewer’s subconscious and help build the story until it reaches (in Red’s case) its first plot point:

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. —Krzysztof Kieślowski, I’m so-so

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