SOUNDTRACKS FOR LIFE

Having attended the film composer Zbigniew Preisner's 70th birthday concert at the Barbican in London a few weeks ago, I felt compelled to revisit some of his old soundtracks. I should also quickly mention how moving it was to see the impressive London Polish contingent among the audience, gathered for this much-beloved figure whose music seems to perfectly bridge the transition from communist-ruled Poland to its liberation in the late ’80s and early ’90s. There’s something organic and unorthodox about Preisner’s music—unbound by the intellectualism of more classically trained composers, it captures something mournfully childlike and sad in the once frozen spirit of Poland’s repressed culture slowly thawing from the deep winter of communism, like a Soviet Narnia.

You can hear it in the music of Dekalog (especially Six), where the vulnerable, Mozart-like plucking of guitar strings sounds like the first tentative steps of a nation learning how to feel again without fear of being watched by the state, with its secret police and surveillance apparatus. Ironically, in Dekalog Six: A Short Film About Love, the main protagonist is spying on a neighbour, but his (somewhat dubious) intentions are of lust, attraction, tenderness and compassion, not dehumanising or tyrannical. By the time we reach Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge, both the director and his composer, Preisner, seem fully liberated from the culture they subverted through their early work together—able to flourish with the unapologetic warmth of two men finally free to express themselves through their combined art—image and sound—in a new world where freedom once again seemed, albeit delicately, within reach.

Pinpointing exactly why this music holds so many memories and stirs such deep feelings in me is easy in one sense and elusive in another. Of course, great soundtracks for great films create instant memories. But then there’s the soundtrack as it exists outside the film—creating memories within your own space and reality. Often, the association with the film becomes absorbed into the fabric of your life, blending seamlessly together, just as it did back in the day when I used to believe I had the powers of Superman every time I heard John Williams’s famous fanfare blasting on the radio or television—only to quickly realise that I couldn’t demolish buildings with my hands or soar above the clouds like a plane or a bird.

Certainly, playing the soundtracks to Dekalog, The Double Life of Véronique, and the Three Colors Trilogy brings back not only memories of first watching those masterpiece films by Poland’s greatest director as a teenager in the early ’90s, but also the moments and places in which I listened to their soundtracks in isolation—times when autumns seemed crisper, winters colder, and a part of Warsaw seemed to infuse the nearby valley where I grew up, like mist wrapping around the treetops. It also recalls the lonely Cotswold town high street at night, where burnt-orange sunsets would dissolve into darkness and clouds of breath would appear before my face, as if I too were living in Kieślowski’s world, just like his characters in Dekalog or Three Colours Trilogy.

I vividly remember watching Trois Couleurs: Rouge at the Lumiere Cinema on St Martin’s Lane, London, when it first came out. The colour red seemed to be imprinted not just in the film itself but in the music—like a form of synesthesia—so that whenever I listen to that shimmering score now, I see the colour before me, as is also the case with Bleu and Blanc (funnily enough). Such is the effectiveness of both Kieślowski’s filmmaking and Preisner’s score writing.

It’s amazing how the power of what impresses itself upon our imagination can become absorbed into the way we look at reality. There was a magical quality to Kieślowski’s movies and Preisner’s music that fitted perfectly with the quieter seasons of the year, when the enveloping dark evenings would focus the mind to listen and think in cinematic ways that seemed wholly romantic.

Listening to his concert selection from a lifetime of work in film a few weeks back reminded me just how much I owe to his music and his kindred collaboration with Kieślowski. Like all great music in my life—those pieces that have become part of my own life’s soundtrack—they have lived with me through time and within my soul.