Kieslowski’s early films on DVD"> E-Mail This Article to a Friend High Polish Kieslowski’s early films on DVD BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Krzysztof Kieslowski Collection II The Scar (1976); Camera Buff (1979); Blind Chance (1981); No End (1985). In Polish with English subtitles. Kino Video; $29.95 each.

Before his death in 1996, at the age of 54, Krzysztof Kieslowski had evolved into the first truly European filmmaker. Few thrived as he did under the co-production system — the "Euro puddings" of multinational funding. (Perhaps he was too successful: Rouge was denied a Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film Nomination in 1995 because no one could figure out what country it came from.) His later films, The Decalogue (1988), La double vie de Véronique (1991), and the Bleu/Blanc/Rouge trilogy (1993-’94), embody the melancholy and the vitality of a long-bloodied continent stumbling toward unification as epitomized in the Concerto for Europe, the piece left unfinished by the dead composer in Bleu. But as can be seen in his first four features, which Kino Video has released in this second volume of early Kieslowski films, this cosmopolitanism sprang from a deep immersion in his native soil.

That soil is seen violated in the first scene of his first feature, The Scar. Shadowy aparatchiks survey a forest under cover of night, making plans for its despoliation. A rustic provincial town has fallen behind the pace of national progress, and the powers that be have plans for a giant fertilizer plant that will lay waste to the landscape but, so they promise, guarantee jobs and other benefits to the residents. To ease the transition, they bring in Stefan (Franciszek Pieczka), a former resident of the town and now a big-time technocrat. He’s no bad guy, and in Kieslowski’s universe of unintended consequences, that makes him much worse.

Kieslowski had already put in a full career as Poland’s foremost documentarian (examples of his shorts as well as interviews with Kieslowski collaborators and scholars supplement these excellent DVD editions) before turning to the fictional form, and The Scar seems at times like a dramatized Frederick Wiseman film, with board meetings and emotional confrontations and the abrupt, arresting image. There is also a minor character, a journalist with a movie camera trying to get to the truth, and you can’t help thinking that maybe the movie should be about him.

Kieslowski’s next film, Camera Buff, is about someone like that character, and hence more about himself and the art of film. It’s one of his masterpieces. Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) has everything a man in the workers’ paradise of Poland could desire: a good job, a nice apartment, a pretty wife. When his wife gives birth to a daughter, his life is complete, so he buys a video camera to record his child’s growth.

A mistake, perhaps. He becomes hooked, filming "everything that moves." The big wheels at the office recognize the propaganda potential of his hobby and set up a cinema club, providing him with the equipment to film celebrations and anniversaries. When Filip ventures behind the scenes, he gets in trouble with the bosses, achieves success with the media, and alienates his wife. By the end, he’s lost his family and ruined his associates. Filming himself staring into a mirror, he recounts the story of his daughter’s birth. A fearful addiction supplanting life, this cinema? Or as a man whose mother Filip captured on film just before her death says, is what he is doing "beautiful"?

Camera Buff suggests that Kieslowski may be sinking into solipsism, but in his next film, Blind Chance, he gives Poland another shot. Three shots, in fact. Witek (Boguslaw Linda), a medical student, loses his vocation and decides to take a train to Warsaw. He barely catches it; once on board, he meets an old Communist who fills him with idealism. He joins the party and ends up betraying his ideals. In another scenario, he misses the train, gets arrested, gets involved in a radical group, and watches his ideals get crushed. And in a third version, he misses the train, becomes a successful doctor indifferent to politics, and ends up taking the fatal flight to Paris that he missed in the first two variations. Blind Chance compresses the "Trois Couleurs" trilogy into under two hours, with less poetry and more politics.

If any further farewell to strictly indigenous issues were needed, it’s provided in the relentlessly elegiac No End. Unlike Witek, Antek (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a defense lawyer, has no chances at all. He’s already dead, hovering Ghost-like over the proceedings. His wife, Urszula (Grazyna Szapolowska), is left with their child and (like Juliette Binoche in Bleu) his unfinished project, the defense of an idealistic striker. Some things are best left unfinished, Kieslowski seems to suggest, in the post-martial-law disillusionment of Poland at this time. No End begins and ends in a Polish graveyard, but it spawns a revitalized European filmmaker.