Excerpt from
Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red: The Individual's Role in Fraternity

By Juree Sondker (Oct 1998)

Krzysztof Kieslowski once related his belief that nations don't exist, "I believe that there are simply.. sixty million individual French or forty million individual Poles or sixty-five million individual British. That's what counts. They're individual people"(1, 216). Out of all of Kieslowski's films it is Red, the color of fraternity and the final episode in the Colors trilogy, that perhaps most notably pays reverence to what it means to be an individual. It is through the use of motion and technology in general that Kieslowski portrays the world of Red as a series of miscommunications and indifferences, which hinder an awareness that our fates, as human beings, are certainly connected. The historian Richard Sennet notes that with the progression of technology "individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space became devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing a fate with others"(2, 323). Kieslowski represents this desensitizing motion with the telephone and most importantly, through the automobile. From Valentine hitting the judge's dog with her car to the disasterous ferry accident, Kieslowski forces his characters to pause and recognize their shared destinies. While Kieslowski proclaims that is just their status as individuals that matters, Red demonstrates that it is indeed the interconnectedness of individuals that gives rise to a type of fraternity.

The opening sequence in Red immediately sets up the dynamic between technology and its hindrance to achieving true communication or connection. The first shot in Red is a close-up of a telephone, that of Valentine's faceless long-distance lover, who dials her number and sets forth the electronic surge that we follow only to have it blocked with a busy signal. Kieslowski uses accelerated motion in this sequence to propel us forward along a short, but somewhat delirious journey-only to make its failed connection more frustrating. The camera follows this electronic path through ducts and oceans, rapidly moving toward something and then in the next frame, just as quickly moving away from it. The image cuts from the ocean to a red blinking light on a black background. The red light is blurry and becomes progressively larger, filling almost the entire right side of the frame. This enlargement heightens the implications of danger and warning of the red light and its representation of stilted communication. Kieslowski does not rely on filters for his representation of red, he instead relies on the materiality of red objects- it is the tangibility of red that makes it all the more insinuating. This flashing red light is a warning that pervades the entirety of the film, to slow down, to stop these detached modes of address in order to realize our interconnectedness.

As in Blue, the first film of Kieslowski's trilogy, Red's plot is also instigated by an automobile accident. Valentine, the young model/student, returns from a photo shoot at night and while driving, tries to fix her radio's mixed signals. While Valentine is struggling with the radio (or technology), she is not looking at the road and proceeds to hit a dog with her car. By hitting the dog, Valentine is forced to stop and exit the safe haven of her car into a beginning awareness that what she does affects the lives of people she does not yet know. In her article, "The Ontology of Everyday Distraction", Margaret Morse sees the automobile as "an iron bubble, a miniature idyll with its own controlled climate and selected sound"; indeed, for Morse, the automobile functions as a mode of isolation from the external world:

            In this intensely private space, lifted out of the social world,
            the driver is subject, more real and present to him- or herself
            than the miniatures or patterns of light beyond the glass (3, 106).

Valentine is therefore persuaded to remove this glass partition that keeps her isolated and feel the blood on her hands of the animal that she has collided with. Kieslowski, in a medium long shot, allows the camera a pertinent stillness that emphasizes this pause and the importance of this dog in Valentine's future. It is important to note that Valentine and the dog share the same frame in a close-up shot where she discovers the name of the dog, Rita. The dog, like the other characters in the film, will not be able to maintain anonymity for long in the wake of Kieslowski's forced pauses.

As Valentine first enters the judge's house, she already shows an ability to enter into the private space of another person without appearing intrusive. Kieslowski uses a panning point-of-view shot as Valentine travels through and among the house's many portals and partitions. The house is almost labyrinthian in its structure, where the judge with his omniscient knowledge, seems perfectly in place. It is important to recognize the many windows in the judge's house, that somehow harken back to the windows of Valentine's car. Kieslowski seems to use glass or windows and walls as parallels to technology's isolating potential. The judge, like the other characters in this film, is subject to the blocked communication and alienation of technology in his perverse eavesdropping practices. Geneva, "a city of coolness and suspicion, of lonely, individual houses"(4, 7), seems to epitomize this loneliness when entering into the judge's life. By eavesdropping on other people's phone conversations he is not actively engaging with another human being, but somehow in the judge's life of permanent pause there is a recognition of human beings' shared fate. However, it is Valentine's presence that forces the judge to call attention to the potential of technology to betray your fellow human beings, and further remove you from them. Valentine's reaction of disgust leads the judge to confess his crime and bring about a gathering and a commonality among the people in his neighborhood. As one by one, the neighbors enter the courtroom, each of them return the judge's gaze and acknowledge his existence (even if in disgust).

After the opening sequence of following the telephone's electronic path, Kieslowski cuts from Valentine's 'missing' lover hanging up the phone to August's apartment. The unfolding of the film's diegesis reveals August to be a younger version of the judge, whose fife parallels the judge's own until the final scenes of Red. In the first glimpse of August in his apartment, Kieslowski positions him in front of a painting of a dancer with her head thrown back and her limbs stretched. The painting has a remarkable stillness to it, and indeed acts to foretell Valentine's presence in his life. A few scenes later Valentine is concluding her ballet class in precisely the same position as the dancer in August's painting. This symbolic link between Valentine and the dancer in the painting is extended through Valentine's career as a model. Valentine is photographed for a living, and is consequently a representation of motion being stopped, or paused. The most obvious example of this is the striking bubble gum ad that presides over the city of Geneva, which asks the passerby (in their cars) to pause. Both August and the judge are given pause by this photograph of Valentine that finally functions as Kieslowski's most lucid sign to stop this desensitizing motion and become aware of other human beings.