A KIESLOWSKIAN WINTER

Finding a soundtrack appropriate for the icy temperatures in Britain this past week hasn't been an easy task as one typically assumes that the colder sounding the music the colder we ourselves become. If I were to put on, say, some Les Baxter-style 1950's exotica and treat myself to a 'Blue Hawaiian' then I might trick my own mind and warm up psychologically which would then convince my freezing body to follow suit. Yet, conversely, I’ve found by embracing the cold and adopting a sort of musical equivalent of the Wim Hof method by plunging my ears into my own audio ice bath I become more quickly adapted to the sub zero temperatures.

And so, the music which has accompanied these frosty, wintry days of late has been the film music of Polish composer, Zbigniew Preisner whom I've written about previously in my essay 'Kieslowski, Preisner and Me' (10th April, 2022) and which continues to resonate for me personally on multiple levels as it's travelled through my life where other artists have faltered along the path.

There are numerous examples of successful director and composer partnerships throughout the history of film who have worked together at the summit of their careers. Along with Lean/Jarre, Spielberg/Williams and Leone/Morricone, I can think of few as harmoniously and creatively entwined than that of Krystof Kieslowski and Zbigniew Preisner who possess that elusive alchemy where image and sound become inseparable from one another. Certainly in modern American film, only the Coen Bros with Carter Burwell come close to achieving a similar type of atmosphere in both film and score. If I listen to 'Fargo' or 'Miller's Crossing', for example, there is a pared down sparseness to the main themes and how they sit in the landscape of their orchestration that reminds me of Kieslowski and Preisner's iconic pairing. I should also mention the beautiful harp and flute themes of Maurice Jarre's score for 'Dead Poets' Society' which also bear comparison with Preisner's scoring (especially 'The Double Life Of Veronique') and strangely recall the Steiner Advent Spiral events I used to take my daughter to when she was a young girl.

There is, however, something uniquely indefinable about Preisner's work which has something to do with the unusual solitary sound and space within his scores. Perhaps it's that late 80s/early 90s post Chernobyl meets Fukushima 'end of history' vibe which seems both part nihilist and part nostalgic, creating a fragile sense that civilisation (on the brink of the digital age) as we knew it back then was about to unravel.

Listening to these soundtracks lately, I've certainly found the music seems to both preserve a specific moment in cultural history and yet also foreshadow what is about to come. It certainly seems a long way from the more excessive and melodramatic film scores of American/European cinema in times past (especially certain Morricone scores and some of the more lachrymose Italian film soundtracks of the 70s and 80s) and yet the minimalist pizzicatos at times do bring to mind the work of Carlo Rustichelli whom I've also affectionately written about previously.

Having witnessed first hand the snobbery from the classical music intelligentsia toward Preisner, I feel the most pertinent thing I can say is that film music often has the ability to reach parts that more 'cerebral' music is unable to. This may be because in many ways film music has to serve the story and themes directly without obfuscation or too much abstractedness. It may also be in part due to the association with the films and the times in our lives in which we watch them. I can certainly remember one cold Christmas Day night watching the first of the 'Dekalog' films with my friend Gorodish and being struck by the atmosphere of Preisner's music. It delivered a visceral impact and transported us instantly into the frozen world of the story.

One of the great legacies of Krystof Kieslowski's ten film 'Dekalog' series (aside from the inherent humanity within each one of the ten episodes) is the director's bleak, yet magical evocation of the cold in the last days of Soviet controlled Poland. For me, the power of the series is in the elusive and mysterious sense of human warmth emanating through often grim or tragic scenarios that brings a cinema beyond naturalism into borderline magic realism/spiritualism.

Perhaps it's apt, then, that 'Dekalog' is a modern updating of the Ten Commandments set amidst the communist concrete apartment blocks of Warsaw where Kieslowski appears to be understanding on a human level why commandments might be broken at such bleak times as these. This lack of absolute moral judgement is perhaps what makes each of the ten, one hour films so compelling. It's a re-framing at a unique point in Poland's social/political history and so rather than observe with piety, he observes with compassion. Often it's the warmth of interiors in contrast to the bleak exteriors that reveal this deliberate contrast between the dehumanising, brutalist architecture many of our characters live in that reinforces this directorial approach to re-imagining the commandments in a communist society.

It's the director's sense that the better angels of our nature will somehow shine a light through the darkness and restore a sense of humanity to a politically brutalised environment where personal freedom and human expression have been both suppressed and undermined (similar to modern Britain where the Covid pandemic revealed a new type of authoritarian virus in all of the political parties and many of our masked citizens across the land).

Perhaps the dystopia of late 80s Poland now resonates with the current bleak sense of encroaching tech/governmental/corporate control across the West in general and so history in this sense is teaching us once again how to understand our present and possibly even our future. Will the next metaphorical collapse of an iron curtain be a digital one?

Cinematically and musically, things became a lot warmer in Kieslowski and Preisner's work as the prospect of the reunification of Western and Eastern Europe became an increasing reality as most overtly demonstrated in 'Bleu' the first instalment of the 'Three Colours' trilogy where the reunification is demonstrated as a dominant musical motif/theme in the story.

From 'The Double Life Of Veronique' through to the 'Three Colours' trilogy, we increasingly see much warmer colours within each frame of Kieslowski's films as if the prospect of leaving communism behind appears to saturate the frame in soft, dusky yellowish-browns, sapphire blues and apple reds . Only in 'Blanc' are we reminded momentarily of the Polish bleakness that recalls 'Dekalog', but even here it is filmed in brighter, whiter tones that seem to suggest a p0litical/spirtital redemption.

I can remember as a teenager playing the soundtrack to 'Blanc' and feeling as if the very air of Warsaw was forcing me to catch my breath, so cold did the orchestration feel. Conversely, the warmth of 'Rouge' with its redemptive string themes creates the opposite effect and reflected its female (Irene Jacob) protagonist's humanity and beauty most exquisitely.

Perhaps, then, this is the legacy of Preisner's scores for Kieslowski's films - that they mirror the emotional subtext of the stories the director wanted so urgently to tell. The empathy demonstrated by the composer toward his filmmaking collaborator is quite remarkable and proves that 'no man is an island' where filmmaking and cinematic storytelling is concerned.

Even concrete, tower block islands in 1980s Warsaw.