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"It's not quite blue. It's not quite red. It's somewhere in between. It's White. And it's a comedy." --Self-created tagline for a presentation of White as part of the weekly movie night in my friend's dormitory hall at Lewis and Clark College (ca. 1995)

Confession: I have viewed a very small fraction of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's entire total output. I make this confession because of how strongly the ones I have seen have impacted me. To this day it fills me with some sadness to think that there will be no more new films forthcoming from him. Among those directors who have passed during my adult lifetime, only the loss of Altman pains me more.

Between 1966 and his untimely death at age 54 in 1996, Kieslowski directed over three dozen films, mostly documentary and primarily short subject, many of these being made for Polish television. I have seen the feature films from the tail end of his career: The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colors trilogy - Blue, White, and Red. The latter films were each named after one of the colors on the French flag and took as their central themes the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity. (On a side note: Kieslowski had threatened retirement after finishing Red. If time has taught us anything, from Ingmar Bergman to the Eagles, from The Who to James Cagney, it's to never believe someone who says they have retired. At the time of his death, he had script treatments for a proposed new series of three films entitled Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, respectively. These have each been made into films this past decade by different directors. Only the first, Tom Tykwer's take on Heaven - from 2002, and starring Cate Blanchett - is well known to me.)

I have also watched his monumental ten-part television series The Decalogue, inspired by the Ten Commandments, as well as the original full-length versions of two of those ten installments: A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing. I hope to someday focus on that series as well and its second installment "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." That should/could prove to be quite the potential rabble-rouser of a column in 2010. I won't go into much referencing of The Decalogue at this point in time, except to note that I find it successful for many of the same reasons that make the Three Colors films so powerful. More on those in a moment.

This is my first Chapter Two to focus on a film that serves as less of a sequel and more of a thematic companion to its predecessor and antecedents. I consider this the final puzzle piece in my crazy-quilt definition of the boundaries of this column while acknowledging that in some cases (in this case?), these columns may be explicitly harder for me to write, and perhaps for the reader to bear with. I have always maintained that the act of a story being told is often as not more interesting to me than the story being told, which may explain my love of tangents and breathless asides as much as anything else can. To put it another way with a cinematic bent - it's not what the film is about, but how it's about what it's about. There may be a small number of "plots" that writers have to work with, but I think the ways in which these stories can be constructed are limitless.

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