Memory and Survival
The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski

Emma Wilson

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Krzysztof Kieslowski
(1941-96)
Polish director
 1 other title

Trauma
 3 other titles

Research Monographs in French Studies 7

Legenda: Oxford, 2000
£19.50 ($29.50 US)  Paperback  160pp
With one illustration
ISBN: 1-900755-27-0

The final French-language films of the great Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996) have indelibly marked the past decade. His cinema has renewed the representation of the human subject and emotion in film: space and luminous surface reveal the finest, most fragile impressions of states of mind and human consciousness. This study is the first to offer specific focus on Kieslowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique and Trois Couleurs (Bleu, Blanc, Rouge), and their place within the broader context of French film-making. Engaging with Gilles Deleuze’s discussions of the time-image, and recent work in trauma theory, Emma Wilson offers radical insights into Kieslowski’s explorations of memory, temporality, loss and desire. Memory and Survival is a highly charged defence of Kieslowski’s work, and proposes a major new reading of this cinema of blind chance and fleeting beauty.

Emma Wilson is a University Lecturer in French at Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Reviews:

  • ‘Those who see him as a key film-maker on a par with Bergman and Fellini will find detailed and sympathetic support in this book. The sceptics, too, should be persuaded by this thoughtful analysis of a ‘cinema in denial’.’ — Phil Powrie, French Studies LVI.2, 2002, 288-9
  • ‘A sophisticated and insightful study... successfully challenges the commonly-held view that Kieslowski was first and foremost a humanist and a moralist.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 38.4, 2002, 480

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