The former Eastern bloc has a long history of producing extraordinary media artists, ranging from
Russia's Andrei Tarkovsky to Poland's Andzrej Wajda, Kieslowski's trajectory is more
unusual than most. A graduate of the famed Lodz School of Polish cinema, he started out
as a documentarist, and only gradually worked his way up to major feature films. Though
his early films were critically and commercially successful, nothing in his track record
prepared audiences for the stunning revelation of The Decalogue, a 10-part
TV series produced for Polish TV in 1987, and one of the enduring masterpieces of
video culture. Later, Kieslowski created the Three Colors trilogy (1993-94), one
of the touchstone works of the EU media culture. Alas, he passed away in 1995,
while he was in the process of writing a sequel to the Three Colors. All in all,
Kieslowski played much the same role vis-a-vis the EU media culture as John Woo provided
vis-a-vis the East Asian media culture, or Heiner Mueller vis-a-vis the European theater:
one of the key artists who took a wide range of local and international traditions and
materials, and transformed them into a multinational art-form. The links below contain
biographic information, photos and other info on one of the EU's greatest video artists.
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