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When Red, the concluding episode in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy, was screened at this May's Cannes Film Festival, the 53-year-old Polish filmmaker took the opportunity to announce his retirement. He now had enough money to keep himself in cigarettes, he told a group of American journalists through an interpreter, and rather than subject himself to the strain and bother of making films, he would prefer to sit quietly in a room by himself and smoke. Perhaps he would watch a little television, but never, never would he go to the movies.
Like most of Kieslowski's public statements, his proclamation of retirement should be taken with a grain of salt. He has long hidden his creative passions behind a mask of sardonic detachment--as did Alfred Hitchcock, a director with whom Kieslowski's career intersects in a number of interesting ways. But while it's hard to imagine an artist of Kieslowski's gifts retiring at the height of his powers, there is something in the image he uses that rings true. Retired or not, Kieslowski will always be that solitary smoker, an artist who sits at a reflective remove from mankind, contemplating the paradoxes and savoring the ironies of human existence.
It's an unusual position for a maker of movies--the most gregarious of mediums, the one art form that is both created and consumed in the midst of crowds--yet Kieslowski is devoted to solitude as a subject and isolation as a point of view. As a Pole, born in 1941 in an occupied country, Kieslowski comes from an entire history of separation and exclusion. Caught between Russia and Germany, Poland is the traditional battleground between East and West, belonging fully to neither tradition, neither culture. Under Communism, Kieslowski was too much of a quirky individualist to please the Party, and too much of a moody defeatist to please the firebrands of Solidarity. Even now, he is a reluctant capitalist, protesting the "economic censorship" of the West, while preserving a distinct nostalgia for the state subsidized film industry of the past, free of box-office constraints.
In the 1979 Camera Buff, the first of Kieslowski's films to attract international attention, a factory worker (Jerzy Stuhr) buys an 8mm camera to film his new baby, but soon begins shooting his family,...