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49 Turning Director Jerzy Stuhr Does Kieślowski One cannot see the world in any other way, but through one’s own self. —Krzysztof Kieślowski, Krzysztof Kieślowski: I’m SoSo He was building a tower. I’m building a little house. —Jerzy Stuhr, “Mam przemożna” In mapping out the constellations of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s legacy, Jerzy Stuhr holds a peculiar place. His career in film intersected with Kieślowski’s over an eighteen-year period, and Kieślowski’s influence on him has been such that critics have questioned Stuhr’s authorship of the films he has himself directed. Kieślowski and Stuhr’s cooperation and lifelong friendship started with a talented film director approaching a promising theater actor to appear in The Scar (Blizna, 1976), Kieślowski’s third attempt at nondocumentary filmmaking and first at a full-length feature film.1 Stuhr was asked to play a character only vaguely defined, with not one line of dialogue and, according to Kieślowski, utterly disposable. Stuhr’s roles in this and Kieślowski’s other early feature films made him one of the most recognized actors of the Cinema of Moral Concern and, after its expiration, of Polish cinema in general. At the same time, Stuhr’s acute thespian sensibility assisted in Kieślowski’s migration from the world of documentary to feature filmmaking in the mid- to late 1970s. When Stuhr decided to pursue directing after 1994, he drew on his experience of cowriting dialogue for The Calm (Spokój, 1976, released 1980) and Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), and his close observations of Kieślowski’s directing method. Renata Murawska 3 50 r e nAtA M u r AWS K A even so, examining Stuhr-directed films for their Kieślowskian legacy, drawing on the professional connections between the two, is as much misleading as it is necessary. On the one hand, it highlights Kieślowski’s influence on Stuhr’s films. On the other, it forces a search for similarities between the cherished master and a relative newcomer to the directing scene, often followed by a critique of Stuhr’s lack of originality, with each difference tempting an accusation of Stuhr’s failure to achieve the heights of Kieślowskian vision. A more just approach to tracing the lines of influence between Kieślowski and Stuhr involves accepting Stuhr’s authorial sovereignty, both as an actor and director, and examining the ways in which his association of sorts with Kieślowski informs and animates Stuhr’s film work, while also giving some consideration to the ways in which Stuhr contributed to Kieślowski’s directorial development. Stuhr and Kieślowski:Actor and Director The first intersection of Stuhr’s and Kieślowski’s film paths was (almost) haphazard . Both men knew of each other’s early successes, but neither had seen theother’swork(StuhrKieślowski’sdocumentaryfilms,andKieślowskiStuhr’s theater roles). Yet, prompted by his production manager, the documentary director approached the theater actor when making his first full-length feature film, The Scar (Zawiśliński 157–58). Stuhr soon impressed Kieślowski, who expanded his character, an assistant to the protagonist Bednarz (Franciszek Pieczka), from a set of insignificant appearances into the éminence grise of the story’s structure. Still committed to realist documentary principles, Kieślowski found an ally in the young actor, whose sharpness of observation and ease in emulating real people allowed him to embrace unreservedly the challenges of the daily improvisations (Stuhr in Litka, “najważniejszy” 22) that were the pillar of the directing method on The Scar. Based on his impression of Stuhr, Kieślowski “had to write a film for him, because he’s so good” (Stok 106), and Stuhr became the lead of Kieślowski’s next feature, for television , The Calm. That film tells the story of an ex-prisoner, Antek Gralak, and his impractical ambition for the “big calm,” defined as a place to live, a family, an ordinary life. not intended as a political commentary (Stok 108), it was refused screening in Poland for four years because it included strike scenes, which upset communist authorities. Although the shelving of a film was considered a compliment for a filmmaker at that time, and the public interest generated by the shelving often was a superior substitute for a commercially driven marketing campaign, another three years passed before Kieślowski completed his next feature film, although in the meantime he continued to make successful...

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