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Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski
Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died in 1996, perfected his art in movies lled with mesmerizing images of beauty and danger. His best-known films, Blue; White; Red; The Double Life of Veronique; and The Decalogue, remain watershed events in lmmaking history. Author Annette Insdorf, Kieslowskis close friend and translator, offers a revealing portrait of his life and monumental body of work. From the gold-bathed images of The Double Life of Veronique to the emotionally dark, visually haunting Blue, Kieslowskis films explore personal and social issues with inimitable brilliance. This paperback edition includes an updated introduction with information on the much anticipated release of Heaven (March 2002) which Kieslowski wrote and planned to film, before he died unexpectedly in March 1996.
- GenresFilmNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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287 people want to read
About the author
Annette Insdorf
12 books10 followersAnnette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of the 92nd Street Y's Reel Pieces series in New York City. Her books include Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director’s work; two books about Polish filmmakers — Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has; Philip Kaufman; and the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel). Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes. Among the recent honors she has received are 92Y’s “Exceptional Women Award” (2020), the Silver Medallion from the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, and Moment Magazine’s Creativity Award (2021).
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
April 24, 2007
people always go for the obvious foreign film directors: bergman, kurosawa, almodóvar, etc. kieslowski is often overlooked but his allegorical films are simply brilliant and beautiful to watch.
November 17, 2022
The Double Life of Veronique & The Three Colours trilogy are four of my favourite European films of all time. The book didn't disappoint in getting to the heart of Kieślowski's cinema. A must for fans interested in his work. European cinema just hasn't been the same since the likes of Kieślowski and Tarkovsky: it no longer feels like art.
December 18, 2016
This will probably end up being a place holder until I get around to reading other analyses of Kieslowski's work, but overall I was somewhat disappointed with this book. It does present a good overview, and I can say that the opening chapters about his early work was truly enjoyable. However, when Insdorf gets to analyzing his films (and I'm mostly thinking of her discussion of Dekalog and Three Colors), the author leaves a lot to be desired. This may stem from 1) choosing to spent a significant proportion on describing the events of the movies and b) discussing each film separately, instead of focusing on how the whole series hangs together.
August 15, 2023
I discovered Annette Insdorf through the Criterion Channel's collection of video essays. I found her commentary on Red intriguing and was happy to find in this book similarly engaging readings of his other work, organized as a narrative about the evolution about his ideas about the role and potential of cinema as well as that of artistic collaborations.
Insdorf begins with an overview of Kieślowski's work as a documentary filmmaker and carefully conveys his reasons for turning to fiction, which would also inform his approach to storytelling from the 1980s onwards: "I abandoned [documentary] because every nonfiction filmmaker ends up realizing one day the boundaries that can't be crossed--those beyond which we risk causing harm to the people we film. That's when we feel the need to make fiction features."
This quotation, from an interview for a Polish magazine, encapsulates meaningfully both the political context of his shift to fiction as well as a sense of moral responsibility towards towards the director's subjects -- a responsibility that, in Kieślowski's view, can acquire a greater freedom when the characters and the story are fictions informed by life rather than taken directly from it.
I appreciated the attention Insdorf gives here to Kieślowski's most significant collaborators: Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with whom he would write every film starting with Bez końca [No End] (1984), the composer Zbigniew Preisner whose playful alter ego, Van Den Budenmayer, recurs through several films as a subtle narrative thread, and cinematographers such as Sławomir Idziak and Piotr Sobociński, with whom Kieślowski developed a distinctive visual vocabulary.
In the final sections of the book, Insdorf writes about the profound sense of crisis in Polish cinema following Kieślowski's death. There is no exaggeration there: a general sense of Polish cinema being "orphaned" and rudderless permeated public discussions of the time. The final, "French period" of his work marked Poland's entry back to Europe after the end of communism. The connections he and Piesiewicz spun between the Polish work (in particular, Dekalog) and the final four films opened up possibilities for imagining a new Poland despite the shock and hardship of the early years of the Third Republic.
La Double Vie de Veronique / Podwójne życie Weroniki does not enact any kind of trite comparison between the West and countries that had been locked behind the Iron Curtain, but subtly conveys a sense of fragility of human life and of correspondences between people "here" and people "there" (even when little is known about "there"). Western viewers may not realize that the older actors (Kalina Jędrusik, Aleksander Bardini) in Weronika's short portion of the story are legends of Polish cinema brought forth to new audiences that had been unreachable to them before. The middle part of the Three Colors trilogy, White conveys the fear -- and reality -- of Poles as Western Europeans' "poor relations," but crafts from that place a dynamic story in which those characters nonetheless claim agency. All in all, there aren't that many movie depictions those dynamics of the early 1990s that do not fall into stereotyping and cheap laughs at the expense of those "poor relations."
Insdorf's attention to these aspects of those final films is rooted in her personal friendship with the director, about which she writes in a very compelling way in the foreword. I was particularly touched by her mention of Kieślowski's arrangements to bring her mother to Poland, to show her Kraków, the city of her childhood. I recognized in his dedication to this plan a very familiar desire to humanize and make real a Poland that, though shattered in World War II and largely closed off to the world for decades, had survived, was eager to rebuild, and welcome guests as well as those who had been banished from it.
Unfortunately, despite this powerful personal connection, the book suffers from some easily avoidable errors, unfinished research, and inconsistencies. Although, starting with the directors own surname, it features Polish names and titles whose correct spelling requires the employment of Polish diacritics, not only are these not included (why?), but there is a number of misspellings that make little sense. For example, the name Ewa (whose spelling is invariable in Polish) is in every instance spelled with a "v," which wrongly suggests that those who bear the name are not Polish -- the spelling with "v" would only be used for foreign names as Polish employs "w" in place of "v."
As I write about this, I'm thinking about the succinct Hungarian pronunciation guides included in some of the NYRB editions of Magda Szabó's novels, which I found fantastically helpful.
An incredibly and completely unnecessarily jarring fragment of the book is occasioned by what I imagine was abandoned research. Commenting on Dekalog 4, Insdorf mentions Śmigus Dyngus, a very old Easter Monday tradition, as if it were the screenwriters' invention. This is bizarre and the tradition is easily verifiable -- among Polish Americans, it's preserved as Dyngus Day, celebrated, for instance, in Buffalo, NY.
Despite these shortcomings, the book offers nonetheless a great overview of Kieślowski's films, his approach, and the symbolic vocabulary he developed in collaboration with people he loved to work with.
Insdorf begins with an overview of Kieślowski's work as a documentary filmmaker and carefully conveys his reasons for turning to fiction, which would also inform his approach to storytelling from the 1980s onwards: "I abandoned [documentary] because every nonfiction filmmaker ends up realizing one day the boundaries that can't be crossed--those beyond which we risk causing harm to the people we film. That's when we feel the need to make fiction features."
This quotation, from an interview for a Polish magazine, encapsulates meaningfully both the political context of his shift to fiction as well as a sense of moral responsibility towards towards the director's subjects -- a responsibility that, in Kieślowski's view, can acquire a greater freedom when the characters and the story are fictions informed by life rather than taken directly from it.
I appreciated the attention Insdorf gives here to Kieślowski's most significant collaborators: Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with whom he would write every film starting with Bez końca [No End] (1984), the composer Zbigniew Preisner whose playful alter ego, Van Den Budenmayer, recurs through several films as a subtle narrative thread, and cinematographers such as Sławomir Idziak and Piotr Sobociński, with whom Kieślowski developed a distinctive visual vocabulary.
In the final sections of the book, Insdorf writes about the profound sense of crisis in Polish cinema following Kieślowski's death. There is no exaggeration there: a general sense of Polish cinema being "orphaned" and rudderless permeated public discussions of the time. The final, "French period" of his work marked Poland's entry back to Europe after the end of communism. The connections he and Piesiewicz spun between the Polish work (in particular, Dekalog) and the final four films opened up possibilities for imagining a new Poland despite the shock and hardship of the early years of the Third Republic.
La Double Vie de Veronique / Podwójne życie Weroniki does not enact any kind of trite comparison between the West and countries that had been locked behind the Iron Curtain, but subtly conveys a sense of fragility of human life and of correspondences between people "here" and people "there" (even when little is known about "there"). Western viewers may not realize that the older actors (Kalina Jędrusik, Aleksander Bardini) in Weronika's short portion of the story are legends of Polish cinema brought forth to new audiences that had been unreachable to them before. The middle part of the Three Colors trilogy, White conveys the fear -- and reality -- of Poles as Western Europeans' "poor relations," but crafts from that place a dynamic story in which those characters nonetheless claim agency. All in all, there aren't that many movie depictions those dynamics of the early 1990s that do not fall into stereotyping and cheap laughs at the expense of those "poor relations."
Insdorf's attention to these aspects of those final films is rooted in her personal friendship with the director, about which she writes in a very compelling way in the foreword. I was particularly touched by her mention of Kieślowski's arrangements to bring her mother to Poland, to show her Kraków, the city of her childhood. I recognized in his dedication to this plan a very familiar desire to humanize and make real a Poland that, though shattered in World War II and largely closed off to the world for decades, had survived, was eager to rebuild, and welcome guests as well as those who had been banished from it.
Unfortunately, despite this powerful personal connection, the book suffers from some easily avoidable errors, unfinished research, and inconsistencies. Although, starting with the directors own surname, it features Polish names and titles whose correct spelling requires the employment of Polish diacritics, not only are these not included (why?), but there is a number of misspellings that make little sense. For example, the name Ewa (whose spelling is invariable in Polish) is in every instance spelled with a "v," which wrongly suggests that those who bear the name are not Polish -- the spelling with "v" would only be used for foreign names as Polish employs "w" in place of "v."
As I write about this, I'm thinking about the succinct Hungarian pronunciation guides included in some of the NYRB editions of Magda Szabó's novels, which I found fantastically helpful.
An incredibly and completely unnecessarily jarring fragment of the book is occasioned by what I imagine was abandoned research. Commenting on Dekalog 4, Insdorf mentions Śmigus Dyngus, a very old Easter Monday tradition, as if it were the screenwriters' invention. This is bizarre and the tradition is easily verifiable -- among Polish Americans, it's preserved as Dyngus Day, celebrated, for instance, in Buffalo, NY.
Despite these shortcomings, the book offers nonetheless a great overview of Kieślowski's films, his approach, and the symbolic vocabulary he developed in collaboration with people he loved to work with.
May 23, 2025
زندگیهای دوگانه: یکی از دقیقترین و نزدیکترین مواجههها با ذهن و جهانبینی کیشلوفسکیست؛ فیلمسازی که حقیقت را نه در واقعیت بیرونی، که در مکثهای درونی و انعکاسهای مبهم روح میجست. ایزدورف، که هم آکادمیک است و هم عاشقِ سینما، با روایتی نرم، همدل و پژوهشگرانه، پرترهای ارائه میدهد از مردی که بیش از آنکه کارگردان باشد، کاوشگری در مرزهای هستی و معنا بود.
کتاب نه صرفاً بررسی فیلمها، که مواجههایست انسانی با فیلمسازی که خود از ساحت مستند به داستانی عبور کرد، اما هرگز آن نگاه مستندوار، آن حساسیت به لحظههای خام و بیواسطه را کنار نگذاشت. ایزدورف با تحلیل آثار مهمی همچون زندگی دوگانه ورونیکا، سهگانهٔ مشهور آبی، سفید، قرمز، و مستندهای اولیهٔ کیشلوفسکی، نهتنها مسیر تحول فرمی و فکری او را ترسیم میکند، بلکه رگههای فلسفی آثارش را نیز بیرون میکشد: دغدغهٔ انتخاب، اخلاق، اتفاق، مرز بین دیده و نادیده، و آن "امر ناگفتنی" که در سکوت شخصیتها زمزمه میشود.
نویسنده با کیشلوفسکی مصاحبههایی شخصی و عمیق داشته، و همین نزدیکی باعث میشود کتاب از یک تحقیق صرف فراتر برود؛ تبدیل شود به مکالمهای صمیمی با ذهنی که همیشه از قطعیت گریزان بود. روایت ایزدورف گاهی شبیه خود فیلمهای کیشلوفسکیست: با تردید، با دقت، و گاه با نوعی سکوتِ گویا.
زندگیهای دوگانه فقط دربارهٔ کیشلوفسکی نیست، بلکه دربارهی نوعی سینماست که به تماشاگر اعتماد دارد؛ سینمایی که نمیخواهد "پاسخ" بدهد، بلکه میخواهد "پرسش" را تا عمق جان بکارد. ایزدورف موفق میشود این فضای معلق، این روح بیقرار و شهودی را به واژهها ترجمه کند؛ بیآنکه راز فیلمها را لو دهد یا آن را تقلیل دهد به نظریه.
این کتاب برای کسی که به سینما به چشمِ فلسفه نگاه میکند – و نه سرگرمی – گنجیست پنهان، و برای عاشقان کیشلوفسکی، نوعی ملاقات دوباره با آن ذهن گریزان، آن خالقِ سایهها و نورها.
کتاب نه صرفاً بررسی فیلمها، که مواجههایست انسانی با فیلمسازی که خود از ساحت مستند به داستانی عبور کرد، اما هرگز آن نگاه مستندوار، آن حساسیت به لحظههای خام و بیواسطه را کنار نگذاشت. ایزدورف با تحلیل آثار مهمی همچون زندگی دوگانه ورونیکا، سهگانهٔ مشهور آبی، سفید، قرمز، و مستندهای اولیهٔ کیشلوفسکی، نهتنها مسیر تحول فرمی و فکری او را ترسیم میکند، بلکه رگههای فلسفی آثارش را نیز بیرون میکشد: دغدغهٔ انتخاب، اخلاق، اتفاق، مرز بین دیده و نادیده، و آن "امر ناگفتنی" که در سکوت شخصیتها زمزمه میشود.
نویسنده با کیشلوفسکی مصاحبههایی شخصی و عمیق داشته، و همین نزدیکی باعث میشود کتاب از یک تحقیق صرف فراتر برود؛ تبدیل شود به مکالمهای صمیمی با ذهنی که همیشه از قطعیت گریزان بود. روایت ایزدورف گاهی شبیه خود فیلمهای کیشلوفسکیست: با تردید، با دقت، و گاه با نوعی سکوتِ گویا.
زندگیهای دوگانه فقط دربارهٔ کیشلوفسکی نیست، بلکه دربارهی نوعی سینماست که به تماشاگر اعتماد دارد؛ سینمایی که نمیخواهد "پاسخ" بدهد، بلکه میخواهد "پرسش" را تا عمق جان بکارد. ایزدورف موفق میشود این فضای معلق، این روح بیقرار و شهودی را به واژهها ترجمه کند؛ بیآنکه راز فیلمها را لو دهد یا آن را تقلیل دهد به نظریه.
این کتاب برای کسی که به سینما به چشمِ فلسفه نگاه میکند – و نه سرگرمی – گنجیست پنهان، و برای عاشقان کیشلوفسکی، نوعی ملاقات دوباره با آن ذهن گریزان، آن خالقِ سایهها و نورها.
June 23, 2015
Annette Insdorf offers a few creative insights into Kieslowski's work, but not much that I wasn't able to divine myself upon careful viewing of the films in question. She spends too many words summarizing the plots of the films, such that it becomes tiresome for those who have already seen them. And if you haven't seen them, you ought to be encountering them on their own terms before you read Insdorf's synopses. Her interpretive analyses are sometimes quite keen, but just as often wrongheaded (in this reader's opinion). For a more engaging look at the cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, see Kieslowski on Kieslowski, a book-length interview with the director himself in which he discusses his life and art, which Insdorf's used as source material for her book.
January 21, 2008
I was really disappointed with this book. It's the first book I read on Kieslowski after seeing a good number of his films. It wasn't really helpful. A lot of filler and very little good, strong analysis.
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August 7, 2008در صورت تمایل، جهت مشخصات فیلمی که بر اساس این کتاب ساخته شده است؛ میتوانید از لینک زیر استفاده بفرمایید
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765
August 17, 2020
Super thorough and love love love it. Lots of key insights to the director's life that influenced his work and how Polish cinema is having a moment since Kieslowski. Probably one of my all time favorite films by him has to be the three colors trilogy.
March 3, 2024
Insdorf’s writing is cogent and incisive but also a bit staid and hermetic. She knows her shit but you also get the feeling she’s not someone who takes many chances. The book is a good companion to Kieslowski’s films but you’re also not likely to walk away with much better insight into his work.
April 1, 2022
A great essay-style overview of Kieslowski’s life work
November 14, 2022
IT´S ABSOLUTELY AWESOME.
October 11, 2022
After being introduced to the wonderful, meditative and minimalist yet emotional Colours trilogy, I was eager to gain a greater understanding of the wider themes and contexts of Kieslwoski’s films. Insdorf’s analyses are simultaneously detailed, insightful and accessible. The perspective of a film scholar now allows me to have a greater appreciation of this wonderful and humanistic filmmaker and a desire to search out more of his films.
March 22, 2014
This book is a wonderful introduction to and insightful analysis of the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski. If you like good movies, movies that have something to do with life as we really experience it every day, Kieslowski should be on your list of directors to seek out, and this book would be a great way to begin. Ms. Insdorf, who worked with and for Kieslowski, both loves and deeply understands his films, some of which (The Decalogue, Three Colors) I would rate as the very best that anyone has ever made. Her writing is crisp, clear, and entertaining, and she leaves you with much to think about. This book has inspired me to watch all of these films again.
June 17, 2014
I enjoyed Annette Insdorf's reflections on Kieslowski's films, even as I perceived a surprising lack of attentiveness to some of the more explicitly religious themes in his films. That said, Insdorf's careful eye certainly enhances my own appreciation for Kieslowski's work. This is best read in conjunction with watching the films themselves, as Insdorf tends to engage with pertinent details from the films.
January 18, 2012
Recently watched The Dekalog, The Double Life of Veronique, and the Three Colors Trilogy back-to-back-to-back, and this book was an invaluable guide through themes and meaning. I also found Insdorf's commentaries over the Three Colors films to be extremely valuable.
July 8, 2011
Well put together, but not all that useful. Kieslowski was only 54 when he died. I thought he was much older. ( Don't smoke ! )
May 14, 2012
Not as useful as I though it would be. Interpretations could be deeper.
June 10, 2014
Some of the analysis could have been stronger. However, the book gave a good overview and works perfectly as a solid starting point for further reading and study.
November 16, 2015
Some interesting personal anecdotes of Kieslowski, but the writer didn't have any particularly interesting insights about why his work was so interesting.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews