Accidental Turns

What follows is a series of images that sum up Witek’s early life and upbringing in Poland. Significant here are snatches of conversations with his now ailing father. Emotionally estranged from him,Witek is thrown into a dilemma when he suddenly passes away just before uttering the words,“You don’t have to…” Witek takes a break from his medical training and decides to go to Warsaw to reconsider his options. Late for his train,Witek tears through a crowded station and on to the platform,after his train. What follow are three possible ways his life could turn out.

In the first story,Witek manages to catch the train,and meets Werner,an old communist. He also nearly helps a hippy resistance worker to escape from the authorities who’ve detained him. But the hippy chooses to stay. “Sometimes,they don’t want to escape,” Werner explains. Like the rest of Eastern Europe,Poland had been under the ire of Soviet communism. With discontent at a peak,the Solidarity movement—which ultimately brought down Soviet rule-and church-supported resistance were brewing. Guided by Werner,Witek joins the party,but soon realises the ethical compromises he would have to make. In the second version,Witek misses the train,fights with a railway guard and does time at a detention camp. He meets a Church resistance worker and joins him. Witek embraces Christianity in search of faith. Kieslowski himself revealed once that all his films are about “individuals who can’t quite find their bearings,who don’t quite know how to live,who don’t really know what’s right or wrong and are desperately looking”.

Blind Chance is revealing in Kieslowski’s own transformation as a filmmaker. This fine film proves truer to his nature as a confessed pessimist. In the third version we find a cautious Witek devoted to work and family,choosing to stay away from politics. In the first two versions,Witek attempts to fly to foreign lands but political or personal circumstances hold him back. In the third story,he boards a plane abroad to meet his end. The Artificial Eye Dvd has special features include an interview with Kieslowski collaborator Annette Insdorf,an interview with filmmaker Agnieska Holland,a filmography,and Workshop Exercises—a short film by Mercel Lonzinski.

The interviews are highly insightful,both of Kieslowski’s work through the eyes of his contemporaries and the political climate they were working under. Lonzinski a highly acclaimed documentary filmmaker,faced severe censorship under the Polish government for his polemical work. Workshop Exercises looks at the role of the media in political indoctrination much before such concepts became familiar to us as they are today.