Seven Women, Seen as One

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996) came to international prominence with the “Decalogue” (1988-89), a mini-series based on the ten commandments, which he then followed with a series of four exquisitely shot films – “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991) and the “Three Colors” trilogy (1993-94) – that swept the arthouse audiences world-wide with their unobtrusive moralism and subtle merging of the sensual and the ethereal. It is fair to say that in my career as a critic and scholar of Polish film, no other name has been mentioned as often to me in conversations with my international cinephile friends as that of Kieślowski. Together with the more historically-minded cinema of Andrzej Wajda, Kieślowski remains the globally recognized staple of Polish cinema and 20th century sensibility alike.

While I consider “Blind Chance” (1981), recently released on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection, to be Kieślowski’s feature-length masterpiece, for me he will forever remain the ultimate master of the short documentary form, which he honed between 1969 and 1981 and in which he is virtually unmatched. Educated by the guru of early post-war documentary cinema, Kazimierz Karabasz, Kieślowski managed to both embrace his mentor’s philosophy of “the patient eye” – according to which a camera can become a sympathetic and illuminating presence if only the filmmaker focuses on his subject matter patiently enough – and to transform it into his own aesthetic.

There are several Kieślowski shorts I consider to be small masterpieces: “From the City of Łódź” (1969) is one of the best portrayals of working-class people at their leisure ever put on film; “Talking Heads” (1980) manages to squeeze out a universal essence of the forty-four interviews it includes; and the long-banned “I Don’t Know” (1977) is a minimalist gem, in which a single interview with a tormented manager of a communist leather factory allows us insight into the convoluted heart of an absurd system that was bound for failure.

Still, it is “Seven Women of Different Ages,” awarded the Best Documentary at the prestigious Kraków Film Festival in 1979, that remains my favorite Kieślowski documentary – as well as one of the finest film documentaries of all time. Shot in crisp black-and-white by Witold Stok at the Ballet Academy in Warsaw, the film makes good on its title: in a mere 15 minutes of running time, we get seven glimpses into the working day of seven female dancers, each of whom represents a different stage of a typical career. Structured as a reportage supposedly covering seven days of the week (we start on Wednesday and finish on Tuesday), the film is in fact a parable of the circular nature of human life.

Kieślowski starts with a little girl being gently introduced to her very first dancing steps by a female teacher: as she stretches and flexes her tiny body, we first become aware of the act of flesh molding taking place before our eyes. At one point, the teacher grabs her pupil’s leg and pulls its way up high, making the girl aware of the capabilities of her own body as an expressive instrument, but also inevitably objectifying her (“Pull in your toes! Your foot needs to be as sharp as a pencil!”). Another lesson, featuring a teenage student, follows – here, the teacher’s instructions are much harsher and the tone is that of brutal admonishment. The girl we see is quietly resenting all the abuse coming from her extremely strict teacher (think a distaff version of J.K. Simmons, in his full-on “Whiplash” mode), but still she follows the advice – her young, tense face reveals fierce ambition.

The third and the fourth segments are the culmination. We see some final preparation (and further testing of the body, as one student steps on another’s thighs in order to stretch them), and then the grand, much-desired spectacle: a Sunday performance on the stage, in full make-up and ballet regalia, serving as the apotheosis of the dancer’s body, art and craft.

After that momentary apotheosis of a seemingly celestial art, trouble starts in the “Monday” segment. We’re back to the regular dancing routine, but there is a difference: for the first time, there is no accompanying music, and all we can hear is the dancer’s heavy breathing and the loud thuds of her feet hitting the wooden studio floor. It’s not that the earlier dancers’ bodies didn’t bear weight or never got tired – it’s just that Kieślowski and his great sound designer Michał Żarnecki withheld those elements from the soundtrack till now. Suddenly, after the ethereal triumph of the “Sunday” segment, we’re back to corporeal reality – the bodies not only matter, but they have the inescapable tendency to get old.

Ageing means one thing for a female dancer: she is no longer offered the best parts, which we see in the sixth segment, taking part entirely during a casting session for a new show to the music of Stravinsky. Camera focuses on one particular dancer, Alicja Baranowska, as her name doesn’t come up in the casting of any of the main parts. She is then called out as a substitute dancer in a secondary group of “ice ghosts” (addressed condescendingly by the off-screen director as “my lovely witches”). We spend the rest of the segment watching Baranowska passively witnessing other people dance, her eyes averted from the younger performers most of the time with a kind of suppressed anguish. In the final, seventh segment, we’re back to the classroom with the little girls – only this time the camera focuses on the teacher, an old and corpulent lady who shows the basics of technique to her pupils. The camera makes a turn and for the first time in the film we get to share the point of view with the character: her own reflection in the mirror (so far, the film has been entirely free of reaction shots).

The movie is a small wonder of focus and succinct storytelling. Without eliciting a single interview from his seven consecutive subjects, Kieślowski manages not only to offer us a knowing glimpse into their routine, dreams and efforts, but also builds a larger structure out of their separate portraits. For, despite the dryly descriptive title, the movie is something more than a collection of “seven women of different ages”: it is, in a way, a story of any woman, of any female artist as she blooms, finds fulfilment and also copes with her ageing body and the culture in which the latter gets relegated to playing secondary parts at best.

Brilliantly edited by the legendary Lidia Zonn (aided here by Alina Siemińska), the film is a small wonder of intelligent focus and inspiring structuring. Each of its seven segments is relentlessly, almost obsessively focused on a single dancer, and yet by the end of the brief screening we transcend all singularity. The film becomes something else entirely: a carefully distilled essence of several lives, that for us feels like the story of a single life and a common struggle – one that we know intimately well, since we all partake in it with our fellow humans.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Seven Women of Different Ages” can be watched on YouTube, by following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_lfxE29ZY.

Michał Oleszczyk, Ph. D., is the artistic director of Gdynia Film Festival, Poland’s prime festival devoted to Polish film past and present. He is a critic, translator and scholar, currently working as Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw. His writing has appeared in “Cineaste”, “Sight & Sound” and at RogerEbert.com