http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200001/ai_n8897015 Clewell, Tammy: The Shades of Mourning in Three Colour Trilogy Literature Film Quarterly, 2000 I.

Introduction Krzysztof Kieslowski has said nothing about mourning in relation to his Three Colours, a trilogy preoccupied with themes of death, loss, and trauma. But prior to his death in 1996, the Polish filmmaker commented that the structures of bereavement play a singular role in human self-definition: I'm not in the least bit interested in taking part in seances of any kind. But I do think there's a need within us-not only a need but also a fundamental kind of feeling-to believe that those who have gone and whom we dearly loved, who were important to us, are constantly within or around us. I'm not thinking about calling up spirits; I mean that they exist within us as somebody who judges us and that we take their opinions into account even though they're not there any more, even though they're dead .... It's an appeal to the good, decent side of us. It's some sort of ethical system which exists somewhere within. (Stok 134) tn the following essay I consider Kie'slowski's trilogy as a work of mourning adequate to the complexities of loss in the twentieth century. Like other sites of modern mourning-Aldo Rossi's San Cataldo Cemetery, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and Toni Morrison's novels-Three Colours refuses to neutralize grief in religious transcendence, heroic patriotism, or aesthetic redemption. The source of bereavement changes throughout the films, from the death of family members in Blue, the loss of masculine omnipotence in White, to the shock of erotic betrayal in Red. But by challenging traditional mourning conventions, Kieslowski consistently depicts the finality of loss, and, perhaps more enigmatically, suggests the material trace that remains after the object has departed. While postulating what Ruth and Archie Perlmutter call the trilogy's "immanent spiritual forces in an alien world" (61), Three Colours compels us to rethink the workings of grief as a condition for artistic production (Blue), masculine subjectivity (White), and cinematic production and consumption (Red). 11. The Ethics of Endless Mourning: Blue In Blue, Julie survives a car crash that kills her husband, Patrice, a celebrated French composer, and their young daughter, Anna. Kieslowski employs a radically subjective camera; the audience looks through Julie's eyes at the televised funeral, and its failure to assuage the extremity of grief. Unable to confront her losses, Julie attempts to suspend time, and obliterate the past. She destroys her husband's unfinished concerto honoring European unification, bids farewell to Olivier, her late husband's assistant who deeply loves her, and seeks anonymity in Paris. More and more in the film, Julie takes refuge in an inwardness whose cinematic signs are coded blue: the cut-glass hanging reflecting upon her face; the water of a swimming pool where she drowns her grief; the lollipop she devours to internalize this reminder of her lost daughter.

Blue sensitizes us to Julie's refusal to mourn, her longing to deny the absence of those she has lost. For all our identification with Julie's pain, however, the film ends as she commences the work of grieving. In charting this move into mourning, Blue echoes insights theorized by Freud, but it also resists the psychoanalytic tendency to translate grief into consolation, to depict mourning as a substitutive economy that restores the survivor's identity. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud drew a connection between the structure of mourning and the constitution of the ego in the passing of the Oedipus complex, a significant revision of his 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia" (28). To negotiate the loss of a loved one (or cherished ideal), the Freudian subject identifies with the other; this internalizing identification resolves the pain of loss by creating a consoling substitute for the absent other in the form of the ego (29). In conceptualizing the ego as an elegiac formation, an embodied history of the subject's attachment to and separation from others, Freud's mourning theory suggests an enduring attachment to those we have loved and lost. But Freud also sees identification as the means by which the subject ignores the uniqueness of the other, and stabilizes a fixed identity. Consequently, orthodox psychoanalysis fails to clarify the subtlety of Kieslowski's assertion that mourning displays "an ethical system which exists somewhere within." A more accurate description of the form of Julie's grieving is available through a consideration of Jacques Derrida's account of "impossible mourning," with Blue's filmic techniques in mind. In "By Force of Mourning," Derrida remarks that we commonly believe the lost other remains inside us as a recollection, visible scene or image. What this description overlooks, he argues, "is that the force of the image has to do less with the fact that one sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it" (188). By insisting that "the image sees more than it is seen," Derrida challenges the psychoanalytic conception of the lost other as a constituted sense in the subject. Concomitantly, he radically redefines the notion of identification to make our understanding of subjectivity more fluid and responsive to otherness. Shifting from the survivor's grief to an ethical relation to the lost object, Derrida argues that impossible mourning isolates the other's alterity, the internalization of which decenters subjectivity, and blurs the very distinction between inside and outside. To welcome a work of mourning without the resolution or closure psychoanalysis has advanced, Derrida concludes, is to give priority to the other, and affirm the shattering of one's own identity as a condition for "hospitality, love or friendship." The strongest reference to endless mourning in Blue points to Kieslowski's profound treatment of a set of photographs disclosing Patrice's long-term affair with another woman, Sandrine, who is now carrying his child. When the photos materialize, they compel Julie's recognition that the image she has created to sustain the imaginary existence of her late husband can no longer withstand the test of time. Kieslowski employs the photographs as evidence of reality, but he also recognizes that such static images, like the ones Julie shelters, might also be used to prolong an attachment to the lost object. By situating the photographs within the film's narrative, Kieslowski exposes Julie's idealized image of Patrice as a fetishized projection, and manages to illuminate a man, in his very absence, who exceeds his wife's subjective memory. According to Kieslowski, the political ideals symbolized by the French flag-liberty, equality, and

fraternity-gave him and co-writer Krzyszt of Piesiewicz a structuring motif for the trilogy: "The West has implemented these three concepts on a political or social plane, but it's an entirely different matter on the personal plane" (Stok 212). Blue complicates our notion of liberty, for when Julie seems most free, with neither others nor an identity to lose, liberty appears as a defensive retreat into the self, a denial of community, and, ironically, a betrayal of absent others in the loving effort to memorialize them. The film's turning point comes, appropriately, when Julie begins her confrontation with loss, and decides on Olivier's urging to complete a salvaged copy of her late husband's concerto, (although the film hints she may have been its author all along). In this context Kieslowski follows a long history of elegiac art in which grief work has gone hand in hand with artistic production. In the traditional elegy from Spencer to Swinburne, according to Jahan Ramazani, the work of mourning has been carried out by making the artist's symbolic mastery and the poem itself a redeeming consolation for loss (3). Elegiac protocols console the poet (and reader) because the loss has been negated, and a linguistic system accepted as adequate compensation. If Julie's completion of the concerto is interpreted solely from the perspective of this tradition (and the discourse of psychoanalysis which perpetuates it), Blue's ending might be viewed as unrealistically conventional: Julie falls in love with Olivier, who has replaced Patrice in her affection, just as she accepts consolation by producing a concerto that transcends the mortal man it mourns. Kieslowski's film, however, blocks any thought of art as a secular redemption for loss. By moving bereavement out from the mise-en-scene of the psyche to an external act of artistic production, Blue exhibits a musical score that refuses to assimilate loss to a solacing abstraction. During the intense period of her mournful isolation, Julie lingered in a cafe where she heard a flute player perform in the street. She recognized one of his tunes, the very same unpublished score composed by her husband. Consequently, when she concludes the concerto with a flute solo, Julie does not neutralize but renews the pain of loss. Moreover, because the finale repeats an already uncanny repetition, she refuses to accept her own symbolic mastery as recompense for her lost family. Evoking the ethics of endless mourning, the hauntingly beautiful score suggests Julie's indebtedness to a past that cannot be recovered, but that imprints its material trace on selfhood and the ordering of signs. In an amazing conjunction of sound and images-of the unification concert and the people who have penetrated Julie's psychic life during the course of the film-Blue illustrates a work of endless mourning that voices all the ambivalence of modern grief, while it also reconnects both self and other, and past and present in the interminable wake of loss. 111. Masculine Grieving With a Vengeance: White Kieslowski's trilogy, as Dave Kehr points out, adopts the form of the traditional three-act play; Blue presents an opening statement of themes, White reverses those themes, and Red synthesizes, resolves, and moves them to a new level (13). Blue wrests a traditionally concealed meaning from mourning, an affirmation of alterity that decenters the self and conditions representation. White, then, documents the strategies of denial by

which a male character avoids endless mourning, and recuperates the loss of his own idealized self-image to fulfill a wish for perfect manhood. Whereas Blue mourns literal death, Kieslowski's black comedy dramatizes a more symbolic set of losses involving the masculine ego. Extending the thematics of mourning in the earlier film, Kieslowski radically depsychologizes the drama of grief in order to emphasize the social production of loss, memory, and nostalgia. The more firmly the boundaries are drawn between self and other, psyche and world, the more insistently the film suggests the fallacy of these distinctions. White opens in Paris, where Karol, a successful Polish hairdresser, is sued for divorce by his French wife, Dominique, because he has failed to consummate their marriage when an ambiguous anxiety renders him impotent. Adding insult to injury, Karol also loses his salon, money, passport, and dignity, and retreats to the Parisian subway where he meets Mikolaj, a fellow Pole who smuggles him back to Warsaw in a trunk. The symbolic key of White is equality, but Karol determines to avenge his ex-wife's apparent insensitivity by becoming superior to others. Seen through Kieslowski's humorous lens, he begins by capitalizing on Poland's unstable market economy, and amassing a fortune. Then, eliciting Mikolaj's help, Karol plots a scheme to lure his ex-wife to Poland, feigning his death, and bequeathing his wealth to Dominique on condition she claim it in Warsaw. The only Polish film of the trilogy, White might be broadly conceived as Kieslowski's elegy for an era, both mourning the end of communism, and anticipating the nation's full entry into the European economic community. Indeed, speaking as a filmmaker, Kieslowski himself has lamented the passing of a Polish age. In making his early films, he recalls a strategy for by-passing state censorship, deflecting attention away from potentially objectionable scenes by filming extra ones for the censors to cut. However, economic pressures of filmmaking under capitalism are impossible to circumvent, for Kieslowski reflects, "I didn't have to worry about the thing which worries people in the West: the need to muster a budget and to ensure that there is a market for the film. I never had to worry about that in Poland during Communism" (Stok 105). Kieslowski may be accused of conservative nostalgia for the subsidized film industry under communism, but in White he clearly employs a transitional aesthetic to depict a country looking toward its future. In dramatizing Polish anxiety about European prejudice, Karol, back in Warsaw, redresses misfortune suffered in Paris by establishing a lucrative export business, and acquiring international cachet. But Kieslowski, the wary capitalist, cautions against a Polish economy in which anything can be bought, including the suicidal death Mikolaj hires Karol to execute, (but Karol loads the gun with a blank, and gives him a second chance), and the Russian corpse Karol buys and buries under his name. As in so many of Kietowski's films, the larger political issues hover in the background of a more sharply focused personal matter. In illustrating the difficulty of creating equitable gender relations, Karol willfully spends his entire fortune to inflict grief upon the woman who has scorned him, an action that conflates a wish to avenge Dominique's apparent callousness, and to recover her love. Haunted throughout the film by a white image of Dominique's face at their wedding, clearly a recurring flashback of nostalgic fullness, Karol stages his death, deceives his ex-wife into attending the funeral, and presides as

hidden director over his grave. Displacing his own loss onto a woman, Karol overdetermines the bereavement of lost love as a strategy to empower the male ego with autonomy and omnipotence uncorroborated by social forms of life. Through a pair of binoculars, he pushes voyeuristic pleasure to the point of absurdity, commanding and enjoying the tears Dominique spills over his sham coffin. Karol's elaborate scheme has effectively reversed their positions: he no longer mourns her love and the disappearance of his masterful virility; she mourns him. Dominique's grief thus becomes the very sign of his authentic self-worth, as Karol has obliged her to mourn the loss of an idealized self-image he strategically claims for himself. Kietlowski's film echoes a persistent history in which the expression of grief has been devalued as female, the opposite of a male code of stoicism and detachment. But by casting Karol as voyeur at his own funeral, White not only attacks Karol's disengagement, but also genders this dream of self-sufficiency as male. The masculine ego, despite the lengths Karol goes to prove its omnipotence, turns out to depend on a female mourner. Predictably, as Dominique diagnosed at the outset, Karol's sense of disempowerment, the cause of his impotency, issues from what Luce Irigaray has analyzed as a fear of female sexual pleasure (77). The greater Dominique's erotic transport, so it seems to Karol, the more she follows the power of her own body, not his masterful control. Since female sexual pleasure seems to require his very absence, Karol intensifies that absence in the form of his own death, and transforms self-loss into an erotic embrace he commands. The strategy proves effective, for by making her absorb the loss or self-difference he himself disavows, Karol regains virility, hides in Dominique's hotel bed after the funeral, and, as the screen fades to a blinding white, surprises her with his resurrection. Dominique's orgasm may be the climax of Karol's death fantasy, but it does not conclude his revenge plot: he disappears the next morning, the police arrive, and Dominique is arrested for her ex-husband's murder. In the film's closing sequence, Karol, binoculars in hand, sees Dominique behind bars. From the prison tower, she gestures her willingness to remarry him, and he sheds an enigmatic tear. White ends, as critics have noted, on a highly ambiguous note. Does Karol's grief suggest he has relinquished his pursuit for omnipotence, and given himself over to love? Or do love and money continue to elude him? White may not be fully decipherable, at least not until the trilogy's close, but Karol's experiences of loss and humiliation are clearly seen as physical displays, bodied forth in a number of comic stunts, before they are internal, psychological conditions. In the film's final shot/ reverse shot, the audience doesn't identify with Karol's gaze, but sees his fixation and Dominique's imprisonment as a consequence of a desire to dissociate himself from the intersubjective conditions of social and sexual life. Because the masculine ego has been historically blessed with an illusory but culturally accredited perfection, it is not surprising that Karol inflicts mourning onto another as a strategy to recuperate masculine independence. But White pushes Karol's phallic fantasies to the point at which they dissolve to frame a ghostly figure, a man without worldly identity who has been caught in the ambivalent plot of revenge and recovery he himself has wrought. 111. Kieslowski's Cinema of Mourning: Red

To read Kieslowski's trilogy as a site of modern mourning contradicts everything about film theory that Andre Bazin to Christian Metz has taught us about the phenomenology of cinematic production and consumption. The film image, in this line of argument, provides the viewer with a fiction of self-presence, a means to recuperate the subject's imaginary possession of the world. So terrifying is the prospect of castration-the recognition that we exist completely inside the bounds of society and its signifying practices-that in watching a film, we fetishize the image, deny the absence of the reality unfolding on the screen, and recapture a seemingly lost plentitude. What opens film to this ritual of disavowal, according to such theories, is a notion of the cinematic image founded on a "lack." Because the images in a film lack any correspondence to the presence of the object, they threaten to undermine the viewer's visual potency. At the same time, it is precisely because film images do not refer to anything but themselves that they enable us to cling to the illusion of reality, and seem to secure our unmediated, visual possession of world, self and others. Kieslowski's trilogy makes us acutely aware that the lack thought to describe the cinematic image assumes a naive understanding of film viewing, presupposing what Gilberto Perez has decoded as "a movie spectator who hasn't learned the first thing about watching movies, which is the convention of the shot" (25). In organizing its image track, Red flaunts its ostentatiously artificial constructions, and passionately explores the absence upon which cinematic representation depends. If classic film theory has deployed the term "lack" to describe an unbridgeable distance between the image and the object, between the filmic sign and the phenomenal world, Red challenges this distinction, and shows how cinema can reveal an absence as much as conceal it. As the closing film of the trilogy, Red repeats the resistance to mourning already encountered in Blue and White: the desire to deny the absence of the object; and the role the image plays in fetishizing an imaginary moment prior to the event of loss. Using a purely cinematic means of expression, Red translates a "structural lack" into an "historical loss" whose local symptoms Kieslowski's cinema of mourning provides a means to overcome. Red takes place in Geneva, where Valentine accidentally hits a German Shepard, and returns the dog to its owner, a retired judge. Clearly the film's Kieslowski surrogate, the nameless judge refuses any direct dealing with others, but uses sophisticated surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on his neighbor's phone conversations. He exalts in knowing his neighbor's secrets, and reveals their repressed desire, drug dealing, and adultery to Valentine, but does nothing to intervene. Kieslowski offers a meditation on fraternity, Red's keyword: Valentine wants to reject his cold detachment, but finds herself implicated in the judge's inability to act, just as the old judge sees her as a figure of love that compels his active intervention. Alongside this emerging friendship, another narrative unfolds: Auguste, a young law student studying for exams to qualify as a judge, discovers that his fiancee has betrayed him with another man, a traumatic event that exactly duplicates the old judge's own erotic undoing forty years earlier, making Auguste the old judge's uncanny double. The failure to accept loss and work through the shock of sexual betrayal has lead to the judge's misanthropic seclusion from others. But he finds in the power to conjure a

worldmuch like the work of a filmmaker-the possibility to forestall this defensive response in others. He sees his task as two-fold: to subvert Auguste's retreat from social life. and to prevent Valentine's marriage to her fiance, a self-indulgent man who groundlessly questions her fidelity. Although the two have not met, Auguste has seen Valentine pictured on a massive billboard, the profile of a pensive woman against a flaming red backdrop advertising Hollywood chewing gum. The image fascinates Auguste, for if blue is the color of grief and remembering, and white of weddings and orgasm, red is the shade of passion, mystery, and desire. While the image of Valentine is at once empty and seductively sad, it cannot be described in terms of lack because it does not claim to represent any prior reality. The example of Red clarifies this point by dramatizing the scene of the image's production: Valentine poses for a number of shots, helps select this one from a sheet of proofs, and turns down a date from the photographer who has been smitten perhaps more by the melancholic image he has created, than by Valentine herself. By intensifying our visual fascination for this blatantly vacuous projection, Red, as Paul Coates has recognized, "resurrects and redeems [the image) from commodification" (24). In actively intervening in the lives of others, the old judge conjures a fierce storm that not only brings the billboard down, but that also capsizes a ferry traveling to England. At the limit of cinematic representation, Red shifts to the register of documentary, as the old judge watches a televised newsflash of the English channel tragedy. Bringing the entire trilogy to a close, the camera records six people who have weathered the storm: Julie and Olivier, Karol and Dominique, and Auguste and Valentine, whose image framed against a red background both mirrors and reverses the earlier advertisement. freezing the young couple in the space of the same frame. Recycling is Kieslowski's apt metaphor for the persistence of the past in the present, for an element of the visual that exceeds visualization. In Blue, Julie, blinded by grief, doesn't see an old woman struggling to place a bottle in a public recycling bin. In White, with characteristic detachment, Karol watches the same old woman strain to complete her task. Finally, in Red, Valentine helps the woman accomplish her Sisyphean labor. The repeated scene of recycling carries more than the trilogy's moral lesson; it also illustrates cinema's ability to reveal an absence as much as conceal it, to insist on both the finality of loss, and the material trace that remains after the lost object has departed. With Kieslowski's death in 1996, Red's final shot closes the trilogy and his career on a compelling note: from a window shattered by his neighbor's protest at his technological intrusion into their private lives, the nameless judge looks out at us. In the wake of an image of a filmmaker we are left with a document of survivors, a cinematic fiction initiated by loss and absence, where unpredictable social and erotic destinies dawn in the shades of modern mourning. Works Cited Brazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of Berkeley P, 1967.

Coates, Paul. "The Sense of an Ending: Reflections on Kieslowski's Trilogy." Film Quarterly 50.2 (1996-97): 19-26. Derrida, Jacques. "By Force of Mourning." Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Critical Inquiry 22.2 (1996): 171-92. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Freud, Standard Edition. 19: 12-59. ____. "Mourning and Melancholia." Freud, Standard Edition. 14: 243-58.