In Ontology of the Photographic Image, Andre Bazin stated, “The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception…content with illusory appearances” (197). Though the publication of Bazin’s post-World War II writings preceded the start of the trilogy by over three decades, their echoes of thought are undeniably present in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic masterpiece, the Trois Couleurs trilogy. It is precisely Kieslowski’s comprehension of the confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological in this context that steers his profoundly captivating visual style. Whether or not Bazin would agree, we can never know for sure. However, given his statement that “The great artists have always been able to combine the two tendencies: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside,” it is likely he would group Kieslowski with the great artists he references (196).
The concluding shipwreck of the trilogy exemplifies the narrative line between the aesthetic and psychological that Kieslowski traces throughout the series with each main character's emotional arc. Recovered in the 1,435 victim crash of the ferry, brought about by an unexpected storm on the English Channel, are Julie and Olivier of Blue, Karol, and Dominique of White, Valentine and Auguste of Red, and an English bartender. Their mutual survival of the accident, which symbolizes the social trauma each character endures in their individual narratives, encloses a message regarding Kieslowski's thematic and stylistic aim. Renowned globally for the depth of his emotional realism, Kieslowski captures an expressive reality of human suffering that captures the "right balance between the realistic tendency and the formative tendency," which Bazin highlights as paramount to substantiating any cinematic concern with the world (38-39).
Before the Trois Couleurs trilogy, Kieslowski worked primarily in the documentary genre out of his home country of Poland before discovering that narrative storytelling could achieve more authentic emotional accuracy. It is not hard to believe then that Blue, a drama about a French woman struggling to remain detached from humanity following a tragic car crash that claimed the life of her husband and daughter, is a color-coded exploration of the limitations of human freedom. Kieslowski’s acknowledgment of his application of color theory highlights this approach’s relevance to a thematic understanding of his character’s interred realism. The darkness pervading Blue is constant across each tableau of the film’s final sequence. Julie, for whom the presence of the color blue is a trigger representative of the traumatic accident that ripped her family away from her, appears first in nothing but darkness until the camera zooms out to reveal her making love with Olivier. However, despite her eventual succumbing to her human needs for a social relationship, the zoom-out keeps moving until we see her wedged between Olivier and the glass of what looks like a fish tank as they “make love.” Despite the romantic nature of the act, black and blue are the only hues apparent as Julie’s song for “the unification of Europe” plays, a piece far more dramatic than it is romantic. The camera continues to pan in the context of this opera across each of the characters connected to Julie in the film: first, to the boy she gave her cross to, then her tv-oriented mother with Alzheimer’s, and after that, the prostitute she rescued from eviction, and then finally to her dead husband’s pregnant mistress. Though each character connotes a different hue (the pale white light of a new morning, the bright orange of a setting sun, the red spotlight of a late-night striptease, the green reflection of an ultrasound operation), what is constant across each frame is the darkness.
Kieslowski intentionally connotes each of the film’s characters with darkness as visual evidence of the constant threat of emotional absence against our humanity. In the context of the story’s entirety, the signifying visual elements indicate Julie’s emotional progression into the transcendence of her disturbing loss. In Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema, Christian Metz remarks that “As for connotation, which plays a major role in all aesthetic languages, its significate is the literary or cinematographic ‘style’, ‘genre’, ‘symbol’, or ‘poetic atmosphere’--and its signifier is the whole, denoted semiological material whether signified or signifying,” (97). If we analyze the sensory techniques invoked by Kieslowski in the final scene (manipulation of light, color, camera movement, and music) as the significate, then it would be accurate to say they work to signify the film’s entire message about the restrictions of life. While Julie tries her best to detach herself from all forms of human contact throughout the story, the ending visualizes her undergoing a womb-like rebirth of perception, allowing her to become social again. The final sequence begins with a zoom-out from her overwhelmingly dark perspective, a visual metaphor for the growing exteriority Julie must confront as a living entity regardless of prior events. The light each character exists in is reflective of their current disposition with life; a young man in the spiritually regenerative white light of a new morning, Julie’s dying mother in the slipping orange flame of a sunset yet unable to see the lush green forest behind her, a prostitute caught in the threatening red glare of a burlesque house, and finally the mistress of Julie’s dead husband pregnant in nature’s fertile green light for her baby’s ultrasound. Paramount to this color palette, regardless of the specific hue, is the darkness that accompanies each light in the context of Julie’s ‘unification of Europe’ composition. Julie recognizes that in every walk of life, the threat of loss, which might rob the light each character perceives as unceasing in their existence, looms constantly. However, even in the overpowering darkness of this absence, as Julie’s catharsis suggests, the maintenance of human connection is crucial not only because of its inescapability but also as a point of epiphany regarding the opposition of absolute human freedom and love itself. Because this realization coincides with Julie’s completed musical score intended to unite the people of Europe, the final sequence becomes a visual metaphor for Julie’s recognition of the impossibility of her freedom on account of her love, even in the aftermath of its wreckage.
The finale of the second film in Kieslowski’s trilogy, White, features its protagonist shedding tears over the sight of his ex-wife Dominique in prison despite her putting him in there as part of an elaborate revenge plot hatched to pay her back for abandoning him in a foreign country, is similarly bittersweet. Furthermore, despite how bleak the situation seems, Kieslowski himself calls the ending happy in retrospect. White begins with Dominique’s successful divorce of Karol on account of his inability to consummate their marriage, stranding him in a foreign country without a penny or a home of any kind to his name. Karol then proceeds to sneak back into his home country of Poland, fueled by his determination to prove himself as his ex-wife’s equal, to accrue considerable material wealth, and eventually fake his death to frame Dominique as the murderer. There is no denying that the situation is sensationally far-fetched. However, much of the marital dysfunction between Karol and Dominique is grounded in ordinary real-world conflict: sexual inadequacy, financial inequity, language barriers, and perceived cultural superiority. What makes their eventual reunion redeeming from a viewer’s perspective is the couples’ achievement of conjugal equality and the example of hope it offers globally to feuding lovers in the context of Kieslowski’s visual dialogue. In White’s concluding scene, it is immediately essential to note that although Karol isn’t literally incarcerated like Dominique, he is visually framed as such. Dominique is spatially distant from Karol (hence his binoculars) and only initially appears as a silhouette. However, when the camera gets close, it zooms in slowly on Dominique, blurring out the foregrounded prison bars, as she enacts a play in sign language articulating her love for Karol and intention to re-marry him if she ever makes it out of prison. During the corresponding zoom-in on Karol, as he cries in relief, the background is similarly blurred-out, indicating the vanishing of their past animosity and the success of Karol’s risky plan to level the balance of power in their relationship.
If Karol truly loves Dominique, why would he go to such dramatic lengths to express it? Though he is not speaking directly about Kieslowski, Dick Hebdige’s From Culture to Hegemony addresses the intent behind the director’s psychological narrative tactics:
“...proposing an altogether broader formulation of the relationships between culture and society, one which through the analysis of ‘particular meanings and values’ sought to uncover the conceived fundamentals of history; the ‘general causes’ and broad social ‘trends’ which lie behind the manifest appearances of an ‘everyday life’” (359).
In line with Kieslowski’s approach to maximize emotional realism is his inclusion of an intimate relationship as tumultuous as that of Karol and Dominique. Though society idealizes most modern relationships romantically as fairytales suggest they ought to be, the truth is that the ‘everyday life’ Hebdige refers to is more comprised of bonds colored by love and hate like that of Karol and Dominique. Moreover, in many such relationships, the breakdown results from a foundation of inequality - be it sexual, financial, socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, or religious. This imbalance is the rationale Dominique offers for rupturing her marriage to Karol, just as it becomes the cause of Karol’s motivation past the first act of the narrative. Even after returning somewhat safely to his home country of Poland following Dominique’s desertion of him, Karol recognizes he still loves her: Dominique’s love imprisons him. And in this prison, being with Dominique is the only satisfactory outcome since, despite her betrayal, she already occupies his mind uncontrollably. So it is essential to understand White that only after Dominique comprehends her betrayal of Karol via “a test of your own medicine” scheme can she love him as he loves her, thus attaining equality.
In Red, Kieslowski’s sensory investigation of human solidarity and compassion unites the totality of his trilogy’s expressive vision. Valentine, a young model and student in Geneva, is disturbed to find that a nameless Judge, who cares as little about other people as he does his mutilated dog, is listening in on his neighbors’ intimate phone conversations. Despite Valentine’s initial disgust, the two form a friendship. The Judge eventually divulges that his pessimism toward human connection metastasized due to a past romantic betrayal that robbed him of his ability to love. Valentine’s storyline intersects with that of Julie and Karol when she decides to help the old woman they both neglect, as it does with Auguste, a young man studying to become a judge. The parallels drawn between Auguste and the old Judge (who states he might not have stopped believing in love if he had met Valentine, or someone like her, earlier) come to fruition when Auguste and Valentine are rescued together from the ferry.
Auguste and Valentine’s unified survival of the crash is emblematic of the commonality each of the trilogy’s surviving main characters shares: their ability to overcome their trauma while maintaining social integrity. For Julie, it is the death of her husband and daughter. For Olivier, it is the death of a dear friend and co-worker. For Karol, it is romantic betrayal and foreign isolation. For Dominique, it is sexual desertion and literal imprisonment. For Auguste, it is a romantic betrayal. And while some might argue that running over the dog Rita or living with her brother’s addiction is Valentine’s trauma, the shipwreck stands out as her trauma since its symbolism incorporates both her emotional conflict and the trilogy’s message regarding human solidarity. Following her encounter with the Judge, Valentine struggles to maintain a grip on her belief in the goodness of human beings and the general inclination to help others. Despite the truth in some of his grim moral observations, the bitter Judge ultimately is the one who changes as a result of Valentine’s kindness and not the other way around. Not only is this evident in his decision to stop eavesdropping on his neighbors, but also in the conclusion where he cares for Rita’s family of puppies in the light of a new morn (a direct visual contrast to his shadowy introduction). That this comes before we see Valentine escape the crash is a visual confirmation of the causality between her neighborliness and survival. It is not her survival that Kieslowski is emphasizing, but rather the survival of her belief in the importance of human solidarity and compassion.
Let's assume the survival of the trilogy's main characters represents the durability of their social integrity in the face of emotional trauma. So what does this say about the 1,435 passengers who died in the crash? The likely response. Kieslowski doesn't believe they'd survive their trauma without spreading corresponding immorality. The rationale supporting this position lies in his effective manipulation of the audience's confusion about the aesthetic and the psychological in terms of realism. "The implicit assumption that it still required a literary sensibility to 'read' society with the requisite subtlety and that the two ideas of culture could ultimately be reconciled found validation in a method - semiotics - a way of reading signs (Hawkes 1977)" (360). Through a semiotic visual style, Kieslowski combines filmic expression with an acute awareness of audience expectations of realism to merge human optimism with cinematic realism. The cinema is itself an idealistic phenomenon, so even though Kieslowski does create an immersively realistic macro-world in which the large majority wouldn't be able to maintain human compassion on a macroscale in light of the series' traumatic incidents, it doesn't hinder him from offering viewers stylistically human characters who strive for a reality that optimistically transcends the emotional imprisonment of their everyday lives. In this sense, Kieslowski achieves a style that employs the pseudo-realism of a deception involving a symbolic iconography exceeding the confines of his micro-worlds duplicated reality to innovate a new depth of cinematic realism and, correspondingly, a new level of real-world influence. In this regard, it's safe to sat Bazin's criteria would suggest Kieslowski is not only a master of cinematic realism but also an all-time great visual artist.
Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4, 1960, pp. 4–9. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1210183. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
Hebdige, Dick. "From culture to hegemony." Subculture: The meaning of style, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1979.
Kracauer, Siegfried. "Basic Concepts." Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Princeton U P, 1960.
Metz, Christian. "Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema." Film Language, translated by Michael Taylor, U of Chicago P, 1974.
“The three main characters of the “Three Colors” trilogy” Medium, 2016, https://medium.com/cinenation-show/the-three-colors-trilogy-is-among-film-s-greatest-trilogies-and-as-radical-as-the-flag-it-is-868db1f0903e. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.