Blind Chance [Poland 1981]

Przypadek
Director: K. Kieślowski
Cinematographer: K. Pakulski

Even with this film, an intense depiction of the beginning of the end for socialist Poland, Kieślowski shows his ability to stand back from the situation and give people credit rather than demonising them. Here we have the most openly anti-socialist film of Kieślowski's, and yet what it seems to set out to show is that the difference between a Communist, an anti-Communist activist, and a non-political person at this time is really not so great.

Again with Kieślowski (at least before his later years), the cinematography is nothing eye-grabbing, and tends to focus on the characters. Nonetheless, there are a couple of visually striking shots and the one of Olga standing in the bathroom doorway almost reminds me of Three Colours: Blue.

But the real meat of the film is its exploration of the human realities at play. This film has been called more 'metaphysical' than his previous films, and maybe this is so, but to me it seems there is a great deal of continuity with his previous projects. Again he is depicting many sides of a difficult and painful situation, again a certain mood permeates the whole even if the parts seem fractious, and again there is a great deal of insight into the personality of one character. This time that insight is developed in this frankly ingenious way, because although we are being shown that one man can end up in a completely different way depending on the most insignificant turn of events, nevertheless we feel that we are still learning more about the same man as these different turns of events play out.

Politically, of course, it is a bit heart-wrenching. The main character, Witek, was born at the time of the 1956 Poznań protests and we are shown him being born in the hospital where dead or dying are being dragged in from the streets. It seems up until the beginning of the film he has had his destiny laid out for him, working toward the expectations of his father, to become a doctor. But now that his father has died, his future is an open book. The metaphor for the entire generation of Polish young people seems too strong to resist.

Because we are shown the Communists who desperately want to change things for the better (although they are trapped in their old and doomed way of doing things), as well as the anti-Communists, as well as a non-political life, we see that Witek himself, and by extension his generation, is filled with conflict. He is not a one-dimensional character simply motivated by ideology. Rather, he is lost, conflicted, detached from a past he would not want to return to anyway, and must now somehow create the future. How he goes about doing it seems contingent and also in some ways secondary to the fact that he must do something.

As for the Communists, it is quite telling that we are shown the best of the Communists--the old ones who cling to their ideals in spite of having been imprisoned during the Bierut era (which one of them compares to the Inquisition, i.e. Christianity managed to recover, so socialism can too), as well as younger ones who want to reform the system from the inside. These people are unable to really change things, partly because their own behaviour is just following old patterns set down by their predecessors. They seem well-intentioned but trapped.

And of course, it turns out that one of them, an older one, secretly listens to Radio Free Europe and supports the strikes. She is of course a Communist, but she is fully behind this new movement. We are left to ponder on this point without further elaboration--I wonder how many there were like her?

So the film starts with disintegration and demonstrates radical uncertainty in the universe it portrays. On a more abstract level, it certainly seems to tell us that nothing is inevitable--no social system (capitalism, socialism, etc), no individual life, no turn of events--that in fact all of our struggles with ourselves and each other and the world often turn on a knife edge. Uncertainty drives Witek to search, to attach himself to a life, and to create something. But what he creates, and maybe what we create, with whatever amount of passion, is maybe not pregnant inside us, but rather pregnant inside a roll of the dice.