Krzysztof Kieślowski - Film Maker

Some years back, I watched The Double Life of Veronique with a friend. This being the second time of four times I've watched it myself. She couldn't speak when it was over and when I asked her how she felt? She simply scratched her head and shrugged. I mention this because, how do you describe an emotion really?

Wikipedia describes the film as follows:
"The film follows the lives of a young woman first in Poland, Weronika, and then a young woman in France, Véronique, both played by Irène Jacob. Though unrelated, the two appear identical, share many personality traits, and seem to be aware of each other on some level, as if they are doppelgängers; but except for a brief glimpse through a bus window in Kraków, they never meet. After Weronika sacrifices everything in the pursuit of a singing career, Véronique abandons her own similar goal because of poor health and attempts to find an independent course for her life, while becoming involved with a manipulative man who is fascinated by clues to her double nature. The man is a puppeteer and maker of marionettes, helping raise the questions that are central to the film: is there such a thing as free will, or is it up to a creator of some kind, or is it just a matter of chance that one acts and thinks as one does?"

It is almost an impossibility to reduce this film to mere fact, for which it is an imperative view of intuition. A "self conscious meditation," if you will of how we perceive characters and how we look at the world. I've seen this movie several times and I can tell you that the literal themes of some one out there in the world that resembles us is appealing. It appeals to my nature in terms of my origin and questions within myself. Equally alluring and enigmatic is the visual distortions and divided frames offering metaphysical meaning as well as query. Kieślowski has said himself that he didn't consider himself an, "artist because an artist offers answers rather a craftsman who uses film to pose questions." Poetic is the way in which Zbigniew Preisner ties the film with his rich and haunting score inspired by Dante's Versus, lyrics which he used. Véronique is a film much to do about music as it is the visual rhymes.

The cinematography of rich filtered light, reflections, shots though windows and circular as well as strait lines all play an intricate roll in the film and it is essential that you pay close attention to detail while viewing the works of Kieslowski in general. I highly suggest that you see The Three Colors Trilogy three separate movies of three concepts where liberation, impartiality and fraternity are explored.



In The Double Life of Veronique there is a gentle balance of exploitation, sensitivity and love. Transcendent clues leading to the romantic aspects give the film its metaphysical weight and it is very worth renting the DVD. It's been said that, "you need to look with eyes wide open, to look with lucidity and perception." "This film not only allows for uncertainty but encourages it. Krzysztof Kieślowski does not want a complacent audience that thinks it understands everything rather wants to leave us with haunting questions that remains for us to answer in our own lives." It's simply a visual poem with metaphysical concern. The brilliant attempt to convey an emotion.

Written for Imeem July 11, 2009.

The Blackbird Says...

She walked down the path on what seemed like any other morning. Her tempo with a fearless skip, for she was the apple of her fathers eye and the china doll her mother dressed in tights, white gloves and lace. She first noticed the sounds in the remoteness of the silent break of day. She curved her head toward the cypress trees just making out a murder of large black birds throughout the mist. Like a great wind the shrill and flapping of wings encompassed her. Her school books dropped to the ground like stones. Shock gave way to panic as the raven took hold of her scalp, claws intertwined and matted in her curls as droplets of blood rolled down her cheeks. The raven shook her viciously and didn't release her for ten years.

Through a plight of exhaustion she spotted a garden just across the way with a green meadow and a strong Oak tree. She laid her head to rest in the cool grass feeling for the safety of the rich soil below. In the shade coveted by the Oak she fell asleep, there she lay in peaceful slumber for twenty years where she grew roots that knotted with the mighty Oak which seeded the Earth.

She dreamed and dreamed until one day, she awoke to the soft nuzzle of a dove. "I will make all your thoughts and ideas come true," said the beautiful white bird. "And all your dreaming while you slept will happen for you." He showed her images of what could be and offered her love and knowledge of the sea. The dove began to fly fading from her vision like a ghost dissolving to the clouds. Desperately she tried to follow pulling at the roots, breaking them to shard split wood. The meadow where she lay turned brittle as she collapsed to a thatch prickly and sharp. Watching the Oak wither and die a wave of misery came over her.

Through the pain that she created there she reached to her head to feel the mark of the raven, when a blackbird sat beside her. The blackbird smaller than the raven you see, says, in his most mocking tune, "How foolish is she?" "For it is a fool indeed who tries to escape her destiny."

Written for Imeem June 12, 2009

everyday was one last look

Addiction

"What have I became
in this false fantasy?
Thriving on something sweet,
submerging into another world.
Without it I tumble
transforming into nothing.
I'm locked in a stalemate
not capable to stir.
Look closely through my eyes,
as deep as the end of sight.
See! My ailment and do
your very best to repair.
Save me from this ogre
I have become, before
I sit in a dark painful void...

lost inside my addiction"

- Claire Nixon

every fruit has its secret

"There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals ;

Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

Openly pledging heaven :

Here’s to the thorn in flower ! Here is to Utterance !

The brave, adventurous rosaceæ."

"Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost."

Text by, D.H. Lawrence - Figs and photography by, Diane Powers.

"the beauty of all this uncertainty"

"It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing."- Emmet Gowin

deviantART journal entry: Fri. Dec. 26, 2008.
Photography by, Emmet Gowin.

The Bucket - Prompt #1

She passed by him in the hall. Her handbag flailing confidently at her side. What made him think of her as a little girl, arms flailing her bucket on the beach? "Unaware," he thinks to himself, like the innocent child in the sand. How can she possibly know her fate? That he would be her death.

Prompt created by Zoe for http://continuum-art.blogspot.com/
"**Given the character of an elegantly-gowned young lady, write a story in the hard-boiled detective genre, using the subject a bucket and the theme man versus the supernatural."

Resurrection of Venus - Wingate Paine

I was born in Los Angeles during 1966. It was this time photographer Wingate Paine published his boudoir book of muses 'Mirror of Venus.' It's been noted that Paine burned and destroyed all the negatives after the publication. It has also been said that the models were all friends and lovers.

I held little charm with my biological parents at this time, two mythological persons I call the Bios. You see, after three months with me they left me with the nuns where I was quickly claimed by a lovely Dutch couple who showed me the world so that the Bios could go on with their life. All that's known of them barely fill page in a profile of feedings and sleep habits. It's been written that he was a poet and she a clerk. He was dark and small in stature. She was tall with long red hair and big blue eyes. So why do I think of the Bios at a time like this? I'll get to that.

Almost forty three years later Wingate Paine's images of muses were celebrated once again in a lovely little vintage clothing store called Resurrection on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood last month. Designs by Katy Rodriguez, walls adorn by the women of Wingate Paine. The images captured theses beauties in intimate moments that give you that feeling of a time filled with morning luminosity after the surrender when the mood is light and warm. A time between the purity of the 1950's and the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Rodriguez designed a collection inspired by this celebration of female openness and femininity and is quoted in saying, " The book is “fashion without clothes,” whose designs have a lot of Paine’s girlishness to them." The collection was donated from private collectors. The exhibit ran from May 21 to June 15 this year under the title "Venus Revisited."






Viewing and admiring the frivolity of these moments of women playfully running nude on the beach, laughing in the bath and posing within clean white sheets I began to speculate the relationship of the Bios. Was she the muse of his creativity? Did he destroy the remnants of words as he blatantly threw me away? Did she in fact survive the artist muse relationship? My entire existence in fact based on question and query, never to be answered. However, not worth tormenting oneself. I now posses a sense of romanticism when it comes to the Bios. Maybe he wrote of a smile and pleasant afternoon that seized him with a passion to burn all that was lost.

"Wingate Paine, 1915 – 1987, was a member of a Mayflower New England family with ties to law, banking and the ministry. He broke from those traditions and became a Marine captain, connoisseur of French wine, devotee of Hatha-Yoga and finally a gifted photographer and filmmaker. Described as his “visual valentine to feminine beauty,” Paine’s series of female nudes were published in his 1967 book Mirror of Venus. This 1960s classic was printed in ten editions and features text written by Federico Fellini and Françoise Sagan. Paine later abandoned photography for sculpture. Mirror of Venus represents the culmination of his photographic career."

Written for Imeem August 23, 2009.
Photography by Wingate Paine.