SOURCE: "The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieslowski's Trilogy," in Film Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2, Winter, 1996–97, pp. 19-26.

In the following essay, Coates analyzes the misconceptions revolving around Kieslowski's films.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's films have long resisted categorization. For the author of this piece, such Polish features as Camera Buff, Blind Chance, and No End had a paradoxical, teasing ability to be political without endorsing political melodramas, without dissipating the air of reality by dividing Polish society into angelic dissidents and demonic Party members, as the New Wave Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski complained most Solidarity sympathizers did. This ability took them beyond "the cinema of moral unrest," a term that was nevertheless piquantly apposite for his work. Even The Scar, his 1976 debut feature so often termed "political," seemed rather to fuse politics with a fascinated tragic character study of a manager's fatal flaw—his urge to fix...