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127 The Picture of Marriage Godard’s Contempt and Kieślowski’s White I very much like and admire Godard’s early films and would gladly pay them some kind of homage. —Krzysztof Kieślowski, qtd. in Paul Coates, “‘The inner life is the only thing that interests me’: A Conversation with Krzysztof Kieślowski” I imagined one could make a film about what remained of this hope afterwards. About the people who look into the sky. —Kieślowski, qtd. in Paul Coates, Cinema, Religion, and the Romantic Legacy Polish critics who decry Kieślowski’s late non-Polish features on the basis of their elision of the material world, their exclusion of politics, and their aesthetic framing of suffering ignore how these films effectively engage with the larger European filmmaking tradition, with that tradition’s discourses and aesthetics. As Emma Wilson notes, “Kieślowski’s French cinema is in part a cinema of artistic exile and of visual self-consciousness. Kieślowski takes his place in French filmmaking through a series of internal references, homages, debts which filter his vision” (xvi). Furthermore, as Wilson has so astutely argued, Kieślowski’s displacement, his estrangement from his own language and filmmaking community, are essential components of his metaphysical explorations. The Polish critic Tadeusz Lubelski has defended Kieślowski in similar terms, arguing that Kieślowski was the preeminent Polish practitioner of the “strategy of a tale-maker,” largely ignoring the strategies of psychotheraSteven Woodward 8 128 s T E v E n Wo o d WA r d pist or of witness more typical of Polish cinema. For Lubelski, too, Kieślowski pursues a consistent line, both before and after 1989, with his last films constituting “his crowning cinematic achievement” (34). Kieślowski’s move to international coproductions was undoubtedly necessary in the face of post-1989 economic and cultural conditions in Poland, but the move enabled the natural progression or extension of his own work, even if the resulting films were less recognizably Polish. The challenging circumstances of production—with the French-based romanian-Jewish Marin Karmitz acting as producer and the monolingual Kieślowski directing a largely French cast and crew—were not a liability but an opportunity for a filmmaker perennially concerned with the foundation of ethics, with relation of self to other. In this essay, I consider how the whole of the Three Colors trilogy (1993– 94)—from its coding in blues, whites, and reds, through its focus on the struggle for connection between self and other and for a related transcendence, to its self-reflexive concerns with the process of filmmaking in a transnational context—can be interpreted as Kieślowski’s extension of his own work through his response to one particular European filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, and even to one particular Godard film, Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963). In this reading , Three Colors: White (1994) is the central link between Kieślowski and Godard, not only because it includes a direct diegetic reference to Contempt, but because it is focused on the subject of equality, the genuine mutual regard of one subject and another, the opposite in fact of contempt. Furthermore, I argue that Kieślowski’s response to Godard’s film continues, even beyond his own death, in Heaven (2002), a detailed treatment for which Kieślowski and his longstanding writing partner Krysztof Piesiewicz had completed before Kieślowski’s death and that was ultimately made by Tom Tykwer. What is the point of the allusion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt that Kieślowski placed in White, the middle film of the trilogy that was his last completed project? In White, the Polish hairdresser Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is down and out in Paris after being divorced by his French wife, dominique (played by an icy Julie delpy), on the grounds that he never consummated their marriage. Meeting a fellow Pole, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), in the metro, Karol explains that he is essentially trapped in Paris. Without money or passport, he cannot return to Poland, where he might be able to capitalize on his skills as a hairdresser. But Karol is not just a man without a country; he is also trapped in a liminal mental space, unable to renounce the woman who has treated him with contempt. He speaks to Mikolaj in awed tones of the beauty of his ex-wife, then leads him aboveground to point her out to Mikolaj. Her apartment, it turns out, is just above the...

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