Winonika's Gaze - About Life, Nostalgia, and a Correlative Universe
Is there really anything that hasn't been said about "Winonika"? I don't need to repeat all the images and clues: the magic ball, the rain and dust, the electrocardiogram, the singing girl's singing, the tense strings of life cracking, the tree of my hometown, and a red scar on my finger.
Kieslowski, and, of course, Irene, the muse, slowly opened the curtain to me in a musical staccato. It was a curtain in the name of the law of causality and the principle of reality:
It had been so lightly overshadowed by the interconnected universe we wanted to see. For the first time such a universe manifested itself to me through the grammar of the lens.
In all these moments, I should always keep this one in my heart. Krakow Square in 1989, crowds of noise and commotion, alienated spectators holding cameras, and the gaze that seemed to come from an infinite distance. This moment is Kieslowski's gaze as poet and narrative thinker between two worlds: from Poland to France, from Eastern to Western Europe, from the 1980s to the 1990s, from the religious ethics of the Ten Commandments, to the blue Secular principles of white and red. Everything intersects here, and then parallels, like two lines of love poems inscribed in between.
I haven't been to Poland under Kieslowski's lens. I don't know what my dear friend saw. What kind of noise and commotion is taking place in Krakow Square today? Maybe it has long since turned into a beautiful silence, maybe it is a huge loneliness, leaving it behind: after the vicissitudes of life. And you should comfort yourself:
Without these vicissitudes that we have not experienced, or are experiencing, Kieslowski's work would not exist.
2019.5.26
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