Early films by Krzysztof Kieślowski rarely enter today’s international conversations about the cinema of the 1960s. And that is a loss, because it is precisely there—within short, austere works still shaped by the discipline of documentary—that one finds one of Eastern Europe’s most compelling responses to the myth of the New Wave hero.
The young Krzysztof Kieślowski—yes, the filmmaker celebrated worldwide for The Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy, and the remarkable The Double Life of Véronique—was creating work that was arguably more interesting (yes, more interesting than those later masterpieces) in the early phase of his career, when he was inspired by documentary cinema and sought to extract existential meaning through close observation of everyday life in a communist country.
Films of the New Wave reached him, as they did all ambitious filmmakers of the time. He certainly watched them, and although he rarely spoke of them openly, we—viewing his work from a Western perspective—can trace in these early films suggestive paths toward a deeper understanding of New Wave protagonists.
Here I turn to his 1967 student film, made during the penultimate year of his studies at film school: Koncert życzeń (Request Concert). Anyone familiar with Polish cinema of that period will recognize numerous references to the classics of Polish documentary and to the narrative films of Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda. Yet today I choose to view this film through the lens of Godard and Breathless, in order to better grasp the figure of the era’s hero and his confrontation with the crowd.
Fortunately, the film is available online in free access, with English subtitles.
By a river, among the reeds, a tour bus has pulled over—noisy and alcohol-soaked, crude and boorish. From its radio speakers pour popular hits of the time, a Polish version of big beat, a gust of Western rhythm absorbed even by the popular masses of this communist country. Within this group, our attention is immediately drawn to a young man who stands apart from his vulgar companions through his solitude, silence, and abstinence.
Instead of listening to loud music and drinking, he secretly watches a couple in love among the reeds. No, they do nothing remarkable. They comb each other’s hair—the height of tenderness in this film—and then the boy sets about repairing his motorcycle so they can continue their journey. And no, he is no sweetheart, no doting puppy. He is a man who devotes more attention to his motorcycle than to his girlfriend, somewhat brusque, yet evidently appealing to her. Perhaps she had dreamed of just such a boy with a motorcycle.
Then they set off. The bus and the motorcycle. They travel along rural Polish roads, and he looks like a hero from American road movies—or even Belmondo. Though accompanied by his girlfriend, he remains a solitary figure, enclosed within his own world, his own thoughts—so different from the hedonists on the bus. Even if he lacks the good looks or charisma of Belmondo or Dean, we like him for this distance from the mindless crowd.
He is not, as in the classic narratives of rebellion, a gangster or a revolutionary. He lives in a country recently ravaged by revolution. He has his everyday life, his girlfriend, and his beloved motorcycle. In some way, he feels more real than those figures—closer to life itself—and his separateness becomes all the more compelling.
Then comes the turning point. The couple on the motorcycle realizes that part of their luggage has come loose and fallen onto the road. The girl insists that they go back to retrieve the tent attached to it. The boy, reluctant, turns around. It turns out that the lost tent is now in the hands of the vulgar excursionists. They demand money, and seeing that the couple has none, suggest that the girl could come along with them instead.
She looks at her boyfriend without emotion, already perhaps angry at being treated as little more than an accessory to the motorcycle, and says: all right. She gets on the bus.
This triggers the boy’s reaction. He abandons the tent and takes the girl back from the hands of the excursionists. She has achieved what she wanted: his attention.
This story is remarkably simple and restrained, unfolding over fifteen minutes, yet it contains nearly all the elements so essential to narratives of that era: a man on a motorcycle, a woman at his side, a mindless crowd. And yet it is different from all the rest. Unlike in Godard, Kieślowski’s hero steps beyond his own world, beyond his personal code, and makes a choice that the hero of Breathless never makes. He truly moves beyond masculine narcissism and takes the girl by the hand. She, in turn, is unlike the heroine of Agnès Varda, and through a simple bluff achieves what Cléo in Cléo from 5 to 7 does not.
This is the kind of cinema worth returning to, because it uncovers a truth that the New Wave did not always manage to bring to the surface through its ideological and political scaffolding.
These characters have already lived through the revolution. Now they are trying to find their place in life.
Perhaps the true breakthrough, then, does not lie in rebelling against the world, but in knowing how to step outside it—even if only for a moment—without irony or posturing. Kieślowski’s hero does not expose society, does not flirt with nihilism, does not celebrate his own freedom. He does something far more difficult: he takes responsibility for another human being. Where the cinema of the New Wave turned revolution into a way of life, he shows its consequences.
Margot ROUSSEAU
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