SOURCE: "Kieslowski's Seeing I/Eye," in The Polish Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, 1995, pp. 53-60.

In the following essay, Garbowski discusses Kieslowski's use of point of view in his films.

There is a scene in Bleu [Blue], the opening film of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy Trois couleurs [Three Colors], which shows the director's mastery of unspoken dialogue with the viewer. The film's heroine Julie is sitting on a Parisian park bench facing the street. Following a whiteout, we see a bent elderly lady on the sidewalk slowly walking toward a bin with a plastic bottle in hand. She can barely reach the opening in order to dispose of the bottle. The viewer has been cued previously by the "blue-outs" that the white-out has to do with the three colours of the trilogy.

The problem dealt with in this vignette is "equality," or rather lack of it. On the one hand...