Focus Features

In February 1996, Krzysztof Kieslowski reportedly retired from filmmaking. “I started to live in a fictional world that I imagine, and was artificial. I ceased participating in real life,” he explained. While he had just finished Red, the third film in his Trois Couleurs cycle, he was not completely retiring, since he had started working with his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz on a new trilogy based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Then suddenly Kieślowski suffered a heart attack, dying on March 13 during open heart surgery. He was buried Powązki Cemetery with a special headstone of two hands forming a screen shape, like a director imagining a shot.  Born to a working class family, Kieslowski engaged in film as a spiritual activity. In 1995, he told the Los Angeles Times, “if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone.”  While Kieślowski started off making documentaries with political agendas, he soon turned to stories about people’s internal lives. Indeed his masterpiece, The Decalogue, a ten-part series originally made for Polish television that loosely used the Ten Commandments as a structuring device, did not focus on scrutinizing public morals but rather empathized with the private dilemmas people find themselves in. At his funeral, the polish intellectual Prof. J. Tischner commented, “While other artists mediated the meeting of people with the world––he mediated the man's meeting with himself. He showed people that within their reach there exists a power by means of which they can achieve harmony with themselves.”

In February 1996, Krzysztof Kieslowski reportedly retired from filmmaking. “I started to live in a fictional world that I imagine, and was artificial. I ceased participating in real life,” he explained. While he had just finished Red, the third film in his Trois Couleurs cycle, he was not completely retiring, since he had started working with his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz on a new trilogy based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Then suddenly Kieślowski suffered a heart attack, dying on March 13 during open heart surgery. He was buried Powązki Cemetery with a special headstone of two hands forming a screen shape, like a director imagining a shot.  Born to a working class family, Kieslowski engaged in film as a spiritual activity. In 1995, he told the Los Angeles Times, “if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone.”  While Kieślowski started off making documentaries with political agendas, he soon turned to stories about people’s internal lives. Indeed his masterpiece, The Decalogue, a ten-part series originally made for Polish television that loosely used the Ten Commandments as a structuring device, did not focus on scrutinizing public morals but rather empathized with the private dilemmas people find themselves in. At his funeral, the polish intellectual Prof. J. Tischner commented, “While other artists mediated the meeting of people with the world––he mediated the man's meeting with himself. He showed people that within their reach there exists a power by means of which they can achieve harmony with themselves.”