Krzysztof Kieslowski; Director’s Works Included Acclaimed Trilogy

Acclaimed Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, best known for his brightly titled trilogy of award-winning films, “White,” “Blue” and “Red,” left the international film community sadly dark Wednesday when he died of a heart attack. He was 54.

The enigmatic, intellectual Kieslowski had suffered a serious heart attack in 1995, months after he had announced he was retiring. He died in Poland after having bypass surgery.

“A bright light on the international cinema scene has just gone out,” said Arthur Hiller, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Kieslowski’s more than two dozen films have been called emotionally complex and serious, yet at times transcendental. Watching them is “like seeing a painting materialize before your eyes,” said foreign-film publicist Melody Korenbrot, who worked with the director on “Red.”

Fellow Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski said Kieslowski’s films “have entered the canon of world cinema.”

The films in his widely heralded trilogy were named for the colors of the French flag and refer to the principal values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. “Red,” the last in series, received three Academy Award nominations in 1994 and was the introduction for many American filmgoers to one of contemporary cinema’s most gifted directors.

Critics and European audiences, however, had been attaching words like “visionary” and “brilliant” to Kieslowski’s name for more than a decade.

Born in 1941, the thin, bespectacled Kieslowski originally wanted to be a stage director, but instead applied to Poland’s renowned Lodz film school. He was admitted on his third try.

He began his career in 1969 by making documentary films about the social and economic upheavals that would give rise to Poland’s Solidarity movement a decade later. By the mid-1970s, however, he had switched to feature films.

A man who read voraciously, harbored a gently wicked sense of humor and insisted that Polish vodka was better than Russian vodka, friends said, Kieslowski had little patience for those who viewed film as business first and art second.

“If film aspires to be part of culture,” he told The Times last year, “it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the life around us and give people the feeling they are not alone.”

One of Kieslowski’s early features, “Amateur,” is about a young Pole ordered by the state to make a propaganda film about his factory. Depicting a man torn between telling the truth and the state’s version of the truth, the film became a study of the filmmaker’s role in society. It won the Chicago Film Festival’s top prize in 1980, the year the Solidarity trade union was born in Poland.

The first film in the trilogy, 1993’s “Blue,” starring French actress Juliette Binoche, is an erotic and mysterious story of a woman who tastes liberty after her husband and daughter die in a car crash.

The dark comedy “White” is about equality. It opens with the hero (Zbigniew Zamarchowski) being humiliated by his wife (Julie Delpy). Back in his native Poland, he gets rich in the early days of capitalism and gets even by framing his wife for his own trumped-up death.

“Red” focuses on fraternity through the story of a compassionate young woman (Irene Jacob) and an embittered retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Through her, he learns to reembrace life. Through him, she finds her true love.

Although the trilogy films were by far the most widely viewed, perhaps his most remarkable achievement was a 1988 series of 10 one-hour films based on the Ten Commandments, called “Decalogue.”

Two of the films were expanded into features. One of the expanded productions, “A Short Film About Killing,” is a dark delve into the nature of murder, both by individuals and by the state, and in the end reads as a protest against the death penalty. In 1988, it won the first European Film Award, Europe’s answer to the Academy Awards.

His other films included “Coincidence” (1982), “Without End” (1985) and the critically acclaimed “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991), for which Irene Jacob won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Kieslowski is survived by his wife, Maria, a designer, and his daughter, Marta.

* AN APPRECIATION: The world has lost one of its great poets of film. F1