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14 posts tagged Kieslowski
Kieslowski BLUE It
(1,100 headlines on this blog, few more intensely stupid than that one)
anyway, i’m gearing up for a summer of film production, which means a 100 e-mails a day about things that can potentially go wrong. stress city. but if i’m ever one of those fancy people who has “an office” in which they sit and “do work and stuff,” i might have this image from Kieslowski’s BLUE framed and put within constant eyeshot, so i can look at it every time i mess up.
the lesson: mistakes aren’t really mistakes if you need photoshop to see them.
second lesson: cast Juliette Binoche. in everything.
“The theme of Red is the conditional mood - what would have happened if the judge had been born forty years later. Everything that happens to Auguste happened to the judge although, perhaps, slightly differently…But the essential question the film asks is: Is it possible to repair a mistake which was committed somewhere high above? Somebody brought someone to life at the wrong moment. Valentine should have been called to life forty years earlier or the judge forty years later. These people would probably have been very happy together. They probably suit each other very well. That’s the theory of the two halves of an apple. If you cut one apple in half and cut another identical one, the half of the one apple will never fit with the half of the other. You have to put together the halves of the same apple to make the apple whole. The whole apple is comprised of a matching pair and it’s the same with people. The question is: Has a mistake been committed somewhere? And if it has then is there anybody in a position to rectify it?”
Krzysztof Kieslowski, essentially explaining how RED informed / anticipated FRINGE.*
(note: unfortunately, the footnote to which that asterisk leads is in an alternate universe. bummer.)
CRITERION CORNER GIVEAWAY!!!!
hey there. it’s been a while since i’ve randomly given stuff away, and that doesn’t jive well with my philosophy that love and / or readership should be shamelessly bought. so in honor of the holiday season - and to make up for lost time / clear my shelf of some extra stuff i’ve got lying around - i thought i’d throw the biggest Criterion Corner giveaway yet.
The Prize:
- DVD of Sidney Lumet’s 12 ANGRY MEN!
- Blu-ray of Claude Chabrol’s LES COUSINS!
- 1 DVD box set of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS! (opened but never watched and in mint condition… long story)
- 1 MYSTERY DVD!!!! (maybe a Criterion film, maybe just something I want to share with a stranger. definitely previously loved).
TO ENTER: just “like” and / or Re-blog this post. each note will count as a separate entry, so every fellow blogger can therefore submit a maximum total of 2 entries.
giveaway will be closed at 12 P.M. EST on Friday, 12/3/2011. 1 winner will be randomly selected from the notes. so the odds should be okay if not super awesome, but someone’s gonna get some great stuff for nothing.
good luck, and thanks so, so much for reading the blog and my Criterion Corner column on movies.com!
UPDATE: GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
REVIEWS OF CRITERION’S NOVEMBER RELEASES!
Criterion often seems to operate inside of an Oz-like bubble of cinematic glory, a company paved like a one-way street of wish-fulfillment, but you better believe they know when Christmas is imminent, because the Big C don’t mess around come November (note: referring to Criterion as “The Big C” is not going to become a regular thing round these parts). Last year it was the America Lost and Found box set that arrived just in time to be gobbled up on Black Friday, and this year I’d argue that their big-ticket offerings are even more exciting.
Krzysztof Kieslowski may not enjoy the same cultural cache as the likes of Jack Nicholson, but for a guy whose first name includes seven consecutive consonants, he’s pretty damn popular amongst American audiences, and Criterion’s lavish and loving box set of Kieslowski’s final works - a trilogy of films that towers over the world cinema of the 1990s - is poised to expose his masterworks to multitudes of new viewers. Meanwhile, Sidney Lumet’s classic debut film, an invaluable piece of Americana, is introduced to the Collection, while Ingmar Bergman’s magnum opus - and my favorite holiday movie ever made - finally receives the HD upgrade it deserves. It’s a month of magic, chance, and justice under the Criterion banner, with each of these films ultimately underscoring the seasonally appropriate message that we’re all in this thing together.
HEAD ON OVER TO MOVIES.COM TO READ MY REVIEWS OF CRITERION’S NOVEMBER TITLES!
The Opening Sequence of Kieslowski’s RED
one of the greatest opening sequences in all of cinema, as densely loaded a pre-title blitz as one might expect from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s final film.
Red isn’t coy with its primary theme of fraternity, which could be argued to be the overarching theme of the Three Colors trilogy as a whole (if you were sadistically forced to pick just one). It explodes out of the gate, physically connecting the opposite sides of a phone call by following the signal through the fiber-optic wires in a blitz of images that anticipates the impossible cameras of David Fincher and makes you wonder what sort of miracles Kieslowski might have worked with today’s technology.
Criterion’s Three Colors box set is out now.
Krzysztof Kieślowski filming BLUE (1993).
when people accuse me of “sitting down on the job,” i’m sure this photo is precisely representative of what they mean. also, i don’t have a comprehensive list in front of me or anything, but this has gotta be one of the greatest photos of a director in action that the great annals of Tumblr have ever known.
in other news, i promise to post about non-Kieslowski things tomorrow.
Kieślowski filming Blue
“In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.”
WHITE (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski) 1994
pardon me, i’m a little hung up on Three Colors, these days.
not making much of a revolutionary statement here, but surely this is one of the cinema’s great images. and not only because it constantly renews my permission to blow the hell out of everything i shoot.
A closer look at Criterion’s artwork for the individual films of Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS Trilogy.
these have gotten a fair share of criticism since being revealed earlier this week, but methinks they each speak to the emotional core of these elliptical films, inviting viewers to look closer in a way that simple photos of the three leading ladies might not. sure, it’s a bit inconsistant that the BLUE cover completely omits a glimpse of its heroine, but it nails her state of mind.
i dunno, what do you guys think?
UPDATE: tumblr person SHASH had this to say, and i wanted to share:
“They’re fine and I think you’re right in that each speaks to the emotional core of each film. Images of the leading ladies would have been rehashed and predictable. There is way too much “clever” over-design these days, and I think these stand apart from that crowd by being oblique at a glance but really appropriate contextually upon consideration. I also really like the outer slipcover art, which is a still from the beginning sequence of Red — an abstract burst of the three colors.”
(thanks to @RyanGallagher for help with the images)
Pronouncing the Masters: How Do You Solve A Problem Like Kieslowski?
and now for your elocution lesson of the day.
i love Krzysztof Kieslowski. you love Krzysztof Kieslowski. and with Criterion set to announce a November release of his enormously beloved THREE COLORS on Monday, we’re all going to be talking about Krzysztof Kieslowski a lot for the next few months.
in a related story, we’re all probably going to be butchering Krzysztof Kieslowski’s name a lot for the next months. it’s a tough one. here’s how wikipedia suggests you pronounce it: [ˈkʂɨʂtɔf kʲɛˈɕlɔfskʲi. thanks, wikipedia!
but thanks to a heads-up play from Monika Bartyzel (@MBartyzel), that small, shameful segment of us who don’t speak Polish fluently have some help.
head on over to Forvo.com to hear 4 native Polish speakers have a whack at it. i can’t say which reading is most correct, but i hope Criterion hired that 4th guy to narrate some special features on the upcoming set.
