{"id":3542,"date":"2016-04-22T15:49:56","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T13:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/brussels\/?p=3542"},"modified":"2020-05-11T15:52:11","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T13:52:11","slug":"symposium-triple-life-of-kieslowski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/brussels\/en\/2016\/04\/22\/symposium-triple-life-of-kieslowski\/","title":{"rendered":"Symposium 'Triple life of Kie\u015blowski’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The famous polish director\u00a0Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski<\/strong>\u00a0was taken from us far too early on 13 March 1996. In order to mark the 20 year anniversary of the death of the director, the Cinema Zuid in Antwerp is holding a retrospective of his films which shaped his career as a film maker. In the framework of this retrospective, we are organising together with the\u00a0Flemish Service for Film Culture<\/a>, the University of Antwerp and the online film magazine\u00a0Photog\u00e9nie<\/em><\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0symposium<\/strong>\u00a0on the topic of the work by Kie\u015blowski, entitled\u00a0Triple life of Kie\u015blowski<\/strong><\/em>. On\u00a0Friday 22 April<\/strong>, we are inviting 4 renowned Kie\u015blowski specialists to the Cinema Zuid:\u00a0Joseph Kickasola<\/strong>,\u00a0Miko\u0142aj Jazdon<\/strong>,\u00a0Pascal Vandelanoitte<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Kris Van Heuckelom<\/strong>.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION<\/strong>
>>>\u00a0Cinema Zuid<\/strong>\u00a0(Waalsekaai 47, 2000 Antwerp) – see\u00a0map<\/a>
>>> Friday\u00a022 April<\/strong>\u00a02016 – from\u00a010:30\u00a0<\/strong>until\u00a017:00<\/strong>
>>>\u00a0Free entrance\u00a0<\/strong>– reservatoin mandatory via\u00a0info@vdfc.be<\/a>
>>> Language of the symposium is\u00a0English<\/strong>!

Programme<\/strong>
10u30 \u2013 Welcome & Intro
10u45 \u2013 \u201cWhen Description Fails: Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Stylistic Evolution\u201d \u2013 Joseph G. Kickasola
12u15 \u2013 Lunch Break
14u00 \u2013 \u201cFrom \u2018the Dramaturgy of Reality\u2019 to \u2018the Dramaturgy of Idea\u2019.\u00a0 Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Concepts of Documentary Filmmaking\u201d \u2013 Miko\u0142aj Jazdon
14u45 \u2013 \u201cKieslowski\u2019s Decalogue: the Gaze as Encounter\u201d \u2013 Pascal Vandelanoitte
15u45 \u2013 Coffee Break
16u00 \u2013 \u201cKrzysztof Kie\u015blowski as a Transnational Director: Three Colors: White and the Cinematic Border Crossing of Polish Masculinities\u201d \u2013 Kris Van Heuckelom
17u00 \u2013 End
<\/a>
When Description Fails: Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Stylistic Evolution\u00a0<\/em>by\u00a0Joseph Kickasola<\/strong>

This address will detail the evolution of Kie\u015blowski\u2019s filmmaking style, from a committed naturalism\/realism in his early features, to a probing formalism in his later features.\u00a0 Throughout, Kie\u015blowski\u2019s concern for \u201creality\u201d will be traced; that is, how his idealistic conception of that notion remained relatively stable throughout his career, but his struggle to approach it through the cinematic medium necessitated dramatic stylistic experimentation.\u00a0 What we have in here is a cinematic outworking of a philosophical problem:\u00a0 how to understand the inner life of humans, in dynamic interplay with the mysteries of existence .

From \u2018the Dramaturgy of Reality\u2019 to \u2018the Dramaturgy of Idea\u2019.\u00a0 Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Concepts of Documentary Filmmaking.\u00a0<\/em>by\u00a0Miko\u0142aj Jazdon<\/strong>

Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski was a devoted documentary filmmaker from the moment he started his studies in the film school in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a until the end of the 1980s when he made his last documentary. In the 1960s and 1970s he became one of the leading documentary filmmakers in Poland and the leader of the so-called \u2018Krak\u00f3w school\u2019, the group of documentarians aiming at true to reality depictions of social life in the country from their side of the Iron Curtain. They wanted to achieve this despite the limitations of censorship. Kie\u015blowski mastered the style of Aesopian language in short non-fiction films presenting what had been called \u2018the world undescribed\u2019 of the communist state. At the same time he managed to provide his documentaries with universal meanings that made them attractive to viewers of different time and space. Documentary filmmaking was for Kie\u015blowski no less artistic creation than feature filmmaking. From film to film, the Polish director tested and improved various documentary methods and strategies, and wrote about them in his theoretical works. He completed his studies in the film school with a diploma thesis on \u2018the dramaturgy of reality\u2019, where he described one of the methods of factual filmmaking he intended to put into practice. Later he proposed other ways to create non-fiction films. These concepts influenced his feature filmmaking and became part and parcel of his auteur style.

Kieslowski\u2019s Decalogue: the Gaze as Encounter<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0Pascal Vandelanoitte<\/strong>

The central characters in Kieslowski’s Decalogue are mostly lonely people. Most of them suffer a deprivation of identity, since identity is mostly formed in relation to the other. Their isolation creates a relatively silent film series in which dialogues are sparse. One of the key elements Kieslowski uses to symbolise the attempts for contact with someone else, is the gaze. Where others as Sobchack have already expounded on the \u2018expanded gaze\u2019 between subject and object in the Decalogue, we want to focus on the intra-diegetic gaze of one depicted person at another. It is in their gaze towards other people that they try \u2013 most of them helplessly, fruitlessly \u2013 to surpass their lack of both a private and a public identity; to feed their search for love and meaning. This is most explicit in Decalogue 6, where a young man spies on his female neighbour with a telescope. Throughout the ten films, Kieslowski plays with the gaze, its character and framing to express both the inner world of the characters, their relation to the outside world and the shifts they undergo.

Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski as a Transnational Director: Three Colors: White and the Cinematic Border Crossing of Polish Masculinities\u00a0<\/em>by\u00a0Kris Van Heuckelom<\/strong>

While Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s first international production, The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de V\u00e9ronique, 1991), uses the trope of doubling in order to expose the various parallelisms and interferences between Eastern and Western Europe right after the fall of Communism, the second installment of the Colors trilogy (White) shifts focus to the unbalanced power relations between the affluent West and the formerly communist East. With its focus on the problematic love story of a French femme fatale and a Polish immigrant, the film foregrounds within a single narrative different, albeit interconnected forms of inequality: between a wife and her emasculated husband, between France and Poland, between Western Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. In order to shed some more light on the changing dynamics between East and West in post-1989 European film, the thrust of this paper is to discuss the cinematic border crossing of Polish masculinities throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with particular attention to Kie\u015blowski\u2019s position as a transnational filmmaker.
<\/a>
Speakers<\/strong>
Prof.\u00a0 Joseph G. Kickasola<\/strong>\u00a0(Baylor University, New York) is Professor of Film and Digital Media and the Director of the Baylor New York program.\u00a0 He is the author of the award winning book The Films of Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski: The Liminal Image, and has published in numerous academic anthologies and journals, including Film Quarterly, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film.

Prof. Mikolaj Jazdon<\/strong>\u00a0(Adam Mickiewicz University & Off Cinema festival, Poznan) is professor of Film, Television and New Media at AMU and Artistic Director of the International Film Festival „Off Cinema” in Poznan.

Pascal Vandelanoitte<\/strong>\u00a0(Ph.D.) (LUCA ARTS, Brussels) lectures on Documentary Film History for DocNomads at LUCA School of Arts. His main interests are arthouse movies, Eastern European New Wave films of the sixties and seventies, and the intertextual use of pre-existent (classical) music in film.

Prof. Kris Van Heuckelom<\/strong> (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is professor of Polish Linguistics and Literature. Previously, he held research positions at the University of Warsaw and the University of Chicago. He is the author of Polish Literature in Transformation (2013, in collaboration with Ursula Phillips and Knut Andreas Grimstadt) and European Cinema after the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility (2014, coedited with Leen Engelen).<\/div>\n

Documents<\/h3>\n