SOURCE: "Auteur Tricolore," in Art Forum, Vol. XXXIV, No. 9, May, 1996, pp. 21, 118.

In the following essay, Brown traces Kieslowski's career from documentaries to feature films and analyzes the director's relationship to Poland.

When Krzysztof Kieslowski retired from cinema at 52 "to sit on a bench in Poland," Cannes reporters seemed almost more shocked at the Poland part. (Why, when he could be sitting in Paris?) Two years later he left us wondering why anyone with his resources would have heart surgery in Warsaw. Few in the West understood the man's ferocious Polish complex. Because he came to the attention of most film audiences only in the final phase of his career, while working in France, we barely grasped the extraordinary integrity of his life or his project, and even critics who praised the four French coproductions—The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colors trilogy—groped to put...