Experiencing films

One of the joys of teaching undergraduate film students is the opportunity to broaden their artistic palates and introduce them to an array of directors, with whose work they may be unfamiliar. They tend to be quite well versed, on the whole, in filmmakers from the history of Anglo-American cinema, such as Ford, Hitchcock and Hawks, for example, although it is striking, and disconcerting, how few students these days have seen, or have any interest in seeing, Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941). When one turns one’s attention to European cinema, however, the picture changes dramatically, if one considers film studies courses outside Modern Language departments where one might naturally expect there to be more interest in, or familiarity with, the continent’s cinematic heritage. Aside from the leading lights of the French New Wave, there seems to be little awareness, or interest, in the work of, say Chabrol or Resnais. There is some familiarity with Italian neorealism, but mostly through films such as Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945) or The Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), but beyond that, New German Cinema and Fassbinder are relatively unknown, for example, let alone the work of Bergman or Antonioni.

The picture is much brighter with the work of more recent and contemporary European directors, however, such as Almodóvar, Von Trier and latterly Sciamma, who seems to have become a real student favourite in the past few years, doubtless as a result of the exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Intriguingly, the success at Cannes of Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), and its subsequent higher profile, has brought it to the attention of many more undergraduates. That said, its status as an original take on the horror film might also account for that, in the same way that The Platform (Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019) has struck a chord quite widely too with its availability on Netflix. So, with that in mind, the opportunity to introduce students to the beautiful work of Andrey Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieślowski has been a particular pleasure, whose work appears little known amongst the current generation of film students, but always seems to captivate once they have seen it. The former is a name they might have heard, but the latter generally provokes looks of puzzlement.

With Tarkovsky, it is his gentle insistence that we must look, and look closely, at what he is presenting on the screen that makes them curious. The opening sequence of Solaris (1972), for example, which is so quiet one wonders if the sound is working on the DVD as the leaf floats across screen on the water, has often brought gasps from those watching. Its simplicity, yet apparent profundity, introduces them very effectively to Tarkovsky’s belief that films should be experienced, rather than interpreted, that their slow pace should draw us in and simply immerse us in these beautiful images. As he himself stated, the ‘poetic image is able to express [the totality of the universe]’ (Tarkovsky 2012, 106).

One bright spark once asked, if we are not supposed to interpret films then why is it then that Film Studies exists as an academic subject, a question it was a challenge to provide a suitable reply to since it is hard to disagree with. The reply ultimately was that one might wish simply to learn either how to make films like this oneself, or to take inspiration from a director who made films his own way. That he wrote so eloquently about his practice adds to the appeal of teaching Tarkovsky, as his essays share a poetic quality with his films. Both are a joy simply to experience, which was best summed up by Ingmar Bergman: ‘Tarkovsky for me is the greatest (director), the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream’ (Bahadur 2016).

With Kieślowski, there is fascination in how his film career evolved from early documentary films at the Łodz film school, with their unique twist of state-prescribed socialist realism, to produce the evocative metaphysical masterpieces at the end. If there is a body of work that still feels somewhat under-appreciated, if not even neglected nowadays, then it is surely his. Indeed, the masterful Decalogue (1988–89), a cycle of ten short interconnected films loosely based on the Ten Commandments and set in a Warsaw apartment block, feels almost prophetic these days in a world where the convergence between television and cinema is almost a given now through the influence of streaming platforms. That two of the shorter pieces were seamlessly turned into slightly adapted feature-length versions, A Short Film about Killing (Kieślowski, 1988) and A Short Film about Love (Kieślowski, 1988), underline the way in which Decalogue could be called an ‘amphibian film’ (Koehl 2007) in the tradition of productions such as Das Boot (Petersen, 1981) and Heimat (Reitz, 1984).

Despite their often stark portrayal of life under communism in Poland, the stories in Decalogue are shot through with unmistakably metaphysical elements – the influence of Tarkovsky’s mysticism, perhaps? – encapsulated best by the ‘angel’, a character who appears in all but one of the ten films and appears to know the fates of those he observes, most notably in the opening episode. These elements were already present in Kieślowski’s earlier films such as No End (1985) and Blind Chance (1987), in the former of which the ghost of a dead husband watches over his widow during the dark days of Martial Law, but would become more overt in his sublime last films, The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and the Three Colours Trilogy (1993–94). Marek Haltof talks of the director’s fascinations with ‘ambiguity, open endings and the role of chance’ (Haltof 2004, 7), and these aspects are much easier to ponder than any political reading of his oeuvre as a whole. No End may appear to be the exception, in view of what it depicts and the fact that its release was delayed for political reasons. Nevertheless, even here it feels as if Kieślowski is more concerned with human concerns, about love and grief, which very much anticipates Blue (1993), the film he would make in France a decade later as the first of his final suite of films.

To introduce students to films that revel in image, in colour, that offer no easy reading and yet entrance by virtue of their aesthetics and inscrutability is a joy. It is all the more pleasurable if that process of students experiencing such filmmakers inspires their own practice, and a desire to take risks. But best of all is how they are reminded of the richness and vitality of European cinema as a whole.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).