The Double Life of Veronique

Absolutely haunting. Philippe Volter, the guy who plays the puppeteer, killed himself in 2005, 16 years after the fact.

shh don't let the plebs know about Kieslowski

But everyone knows the Three Colors trilogy.

hja ha im such a patrician caus i watch a movie by man not talked of on tv!! i dont understand but still im a patricsh ur all plebs! but be careful if others know then ur not a ptrashish like me

I loved the colors and Irene Jacob in this movie is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I liked what Ebert said about her perfect, unblemished skin was like a empty canvas waiting for experience to be written on it.

also

Veronika > Veronique

Dekalog is always on lists of "best TV shows ever." That's like calling Berlin Alexanderplatz or something a "hidden gem." It's pretty much as well-known as it can get given the fact that most people aren't interested in hardcore kino.

The problem with KK is that he was a social realist Eastern Bloc director whose distribution had relied on - let's be honest - the anti-Soviet leftist/liberal humanist network in Western bourgeois film markets. Once Communism ended, he needed to recalibrate in order to keep his career, as that network withered (loss of raison d'etre, or loss of CIA funds? You decide). He moved to France for the money, and made films that meant nothing. The point of The Double Life of Veronique is to state that there is no essential difference between making films in Poland and making films in France. The same story happens to a Polish girl and a French girl, to show that there's nothing lost in the transition, that a director can make films anywhere.

For most directors, that would be true - Polanski, for example, was never essentially part of Poland's social realist film culture and was better out of it. For Kieslowski, a former documentarian whose USP in Western markets was the insights he provided into life in Communist Poland, it is not true. Kieslowski has two audiences, and they don't overlap - the audience for the Polish films, and the audience for the French films. The Polish films are a coherent body of work. The French films exist because Kieslowski is too young to retire and doesn't want to change careers. Their aesthetic is glossy and commercial-like because Kieslowski thinks that's all that lies beyond realism. They're great starter pack art cinema because the ambiguities in them are arbitrary, so they're basically impossible to miss the point of. In short, he's working in bad faith.

This movie is awful, it's for people who buy 'Only the Famous Bits' classical music compilations. The color scheme is some arbitrary vomit. Weinstein getting Kieslowski to shoot a new ending is held up as an example of his philistinism, but that ending is an empty gesture of mystery with no internal logic, the 'art cinema' gambit of a man who isn't into art cinema.

>Irene Jacob in this movie is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen
Huh, and here I thought I was having some weird revelation during the film. As if in a trance, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Is this pasta?
>The same story happens
But this is exactly the contrary of what happens in the film, where minor discrepancies between otherwise identical lives cause each to diverge. Their lives are identical - with even the death of their mothers - up until certain events split their double lives apart; Weronika getting her finger injured and being unable to excel at musical instruments is an example of this. There seems to be a theme of uncertain inevitability throughout.
>the ambiguities in them are arbitrary
Can this not be said for much of film, and art as a whole? In what instances is a director or artist expressing individual artistic freedom in firm objective truths? The scope of many an artistic work leads to ambiguities, which leads to subjective interpretation and uncertainty, which makes objective interpretation utterly arbitrary and thus null. There is only the arbitrary truth, as even firm statements are in themselves opinion.

As for the other points, I cannot address nor refute them, as I am too lowbrow and unread.

No, it's not pasta. Quirks of fate aren't social reality, which is the point - if the only differences between the women are down to chaos theory, social environment means nothing - the reverse of a social realist worldview.

>Can this not be said for much of film, and art as a whole?
No. This is great, you're the guy who was whining about a lack of substance on the Moonlight thread, then it turns out you think in abstractions.

>As for the other points, I cannot address nor refute them, as I am too lowbrow and unread.
Thank you for being so candid.

serious discussion on Sup Forums?

the fuck outta here

I feel like watching some real kino tonight, which one of these should i watch?

>Celine and Julie go boating
>Blind Chance
>In the Mood for love

That's not the user in the MOTY thread, I'm the one 'whining', though I'd prefer to think of it as calling a spade a spade, and Sup Forums is a cesspool of shit. Generally agree with most of what you said in and anyone who has seen his pre-Veronique movies should be able to suss this out. I'm not quite as harsh a critic of Veronique or the trilogy but they're definitely lacking the kind of soul someone like Antonioni might have brought to the table with similar affairs. For me, they get by on cinematography and score. I've sat down and attempted to write actual critical essays on them on numerous occasions and gave up each time because there just isn't enough to play with. There was certainly enough in Kieslowski on Kieslowski to understand why he wouldn't be able to handle films like this, but I'm not going to hold it against people for liking them, I certainly wanted to and sometimes still do.

Celine and Julie.

A shift in focus from social realism to metaphysics - is it really too hard to accept this was a legitimate turn in Kieslowski's career?

The only one that is good is In the Mood for Love, and even then you're stretching it

lol Three Colors is the essential "ree im' so different depressed dotard' trilogy for every self proclaimed hipster

and he fucking sucks

>like a empty canvas waiting for experience to be written on it.
like a facial ejaculation

Yes, but only because of the results. It can happen and has happened that directors' interests develop and change, but if someone's field of interest changes, the work should seem like it's really interested in the subject, shouldn't it? It should seem fresh and engaged.

Not in some cases, but when someone whose career has been staked on a political reality that suddenly ceases to exist takes this kind of turn, it should at least be subject to some scrutiny. It's not the same thing as trading horror for romantic comedy.

Oh cool, I'm glad two people followed that link!

I haven't read Kieslowski on Kieslowski, I may do that.

>if the only differences between the women are down to chaos theory, social environment means nothing
No, just no: any given social environment is a direct result of chaos. This is the difference between primitive tribes living in mud huts as the rest of the more-civilized world throughout eternity. And what the hell do you mean, what is "social environment" even supposed to mean in your context of "nothing"?
But you know what? Fuck you for ruining this for me. This was the best film I've seen in a long time, and I've recently seen Edward Yang, Jim Jarmusch, Paolo Sorrentino, and Fellini, and was happy to finally find an even greater director only for you to tell me he's utter rubbish and even the likes of Polanski are better. I simply cannot believe that, say, Tess or The Pianist are a better film than this, but nonetheless your pretentious spew has convinced me and I will now contemplate melancholy with the sudden realization I've wasted hundreds of hours on mediocre, arbitrary vomit masquerading as cinema.

Kieslowski's interest in phenomenology and qualia does seem quite genuine to me, and not at all like a sacrifice of self nor a pandering to Western audiences obsessed with formalism

>what is "social environment" even supposed to mean in your context of "nothing"?

What it meant in everything Kieslowski made in Poland, essentially. It's because it meant that to him that I have reservations about it suddenly meaning nothing.

you take the opinions of others far too seriously. The other user is evidently more concerned with Cinema as a hermeneutic tool for social and historical analysis. That is fine, but it is also ok to appreciate the film's metaphysical semiotics and philosophy. You may not be able to write as discursive an essay on the topic, but that doesn't make it any less valuable a filmic pursuit

>But you know what? Fuck you for ruining this for me.
I congratulate you for being able to entertain what I wrote rather than sticking your fingers in your ears.

>The other user is evidently more concerned with Cinema as a hermeneutic tool for social and historical analysis. That is fine, but it is also ok to appreciate the film's metaphysical semiotics and philosophy.
No, I'm not big on social realism myself. It's not the switch that I object to, it's what the resulting work indicates, taken in context.

... and also, simply, what the resulting work IS. It does look like a commercial; it is arbitrary the way people who don't 'get' art cinema think art cinema is arbitrary.

This says it in two sentences, thank you user.

you strike me as somebody not particularly familiar with Heidegger. There's quite a lot more at work in Double Life than you seem to attest

really? I thought that post was actually quite reductive and missed the point, which is why I didn't reply to it

what's a dotard

You strike me as someone who doesn't know what 'attest' means.

In what sense is it reductive?

attest - declare that something exists or is the case.

You have stated that it is the case that a great deal of The Double Life of Veronique is arbitrary and lacks substance. You have attested this, erroneously I might add

comparing a shift in filmic sensibility to a switch between genres. It is not at all the same thing

Enlighten me. Not the user you replied to but I'm reasonably familiar with Heidegger through Mindfulness, haven't kept up with newer translations though.

That's what the post said. You're agreeing with the post you were dismissing.

No, attest means to bear witness to something being the case. That I have attested that the film has little substance is true - what I haven't done is simply declare it. You can't say 'there's more in the film than you have proven'. You're confirming the nature of its appeal with your impression of a sitcom intellectual.

>I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
This is odd considering the post you quoted; what couldn't you believe? The boobies?

I'm the user who posted . The meaty posts seem to be over now - it's going to be a quibbling trip up a blind alley with someone who may not even have seen the film being discussed, so I'm out. Bye all, happy posting.

Do I have to google it for you and copy/paste?
You write a lot of words for somebody that clearly has nothing to say other than "I don't like Kieslowski's new movies because they're not like his old ones." You haven't criticized Double Life in a meaningful way, and have simply sunk to crass insults like comparing it to a commercial and calling it arbitrary. What you've said means nothing, just bourgeois wannabe-film-critic posturing that reflects your complete inability to view the film through a phenomenological lens.

You also seem quite preoccupied with reducing the argument to petty semantic quibbling, which is really not worth anyone's time.

you're been a total condescending, pretentious faggot the whole time anyway. Worthless contribution

Answer this: .

What do you niggers think of terayama

>he's proud of his 3 paragraphs bearing no more depth than a Wikipedia summary combined with a dismissive 2nd year film studies disparagement

Not like I expected anything else on Sup Forums

I did not write that. I assume it was some user who saw me write phenomenology earlier in the thread and wanted to namedrop Heidegger to feel involved

completely arbitrary. Looks like a commercial

Btfo

Check out this samefag.

I am and but not

Obviously, he just worded it more fancy.