Trois couleurs: Bleu (France-Switzerland-Poland 1993)

The ‘Three Colours Trilogy’ proved to be a major project in the development of what might be termed ‘international arthouse cinema’. The three films directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski are currently streaming on MUBI. In 2010 I used the first film in the trilogy, Three Colours Blue in an Evening Class course about ‘Music in Film’ and a slightly amended version of the notes I produced then are offered here. Time permitting I will try to post something on the other two films in the trilogy later. Background

In the early 1990s, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-96) became the leading auteur in European Cinema – the director whose films would be most eagerly sought by distributors and whose name would guarantee audiences in cinemas. His was by no means an ‘overnight success’ since he had begun his directing career in 1969 on graduating from the famous Lodz Film School in Poland. He was first a documentarist and worked in Polish television. It wasn’t until 1979’s Camera Buff and his move into fiction that his work began to be seen outside Poland. His international profile was finally established by the series of ten one hour films for Polish television, Dekalog (1989-90), which achieved theatrical screenings internationally, two of them being extended into feature length as A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love.

During the difficult days of working in the Polish media before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kieślowski’s work explored Polish life in the context of an oppressive regime. After Dekalog he received the support of the French producer Marin Karmitz and, despite the language difficulties between the two men they quickly formed a partnership which delivered Kieslowski’s last four films, each made as international co-productions with a French-speaking leading actor.

Just like Alfred Hitchcock and many others, Kieślowski had his close collaborators, the principal two being writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak (who had worked on earlier films with Kieslowski) is an important contributor to Bleu, but the other two films in the trilogy were shot by different cinematographers. Kieślowski was lucky to find three Polish cinematographers working in an international context. With a mainly Polish creative team, producer Karmitz suggested that the film had a strong Polish perspective on French life – something that he was able to slightly change as the production progressed such that the film worked as an international production.

Outline of Three Colours Blue At the beginning of the narrative, Julie (Juliette Binoche) is travelling with her young daughter in a car driven by her husband Patrice when a fault causes the car to spin off the road and hit a tree. Her husband and her daughter are killed but Julie survives. When she recovers in hospital, a distraught Julie attempts suicide but fails and then decides to more or less withdraw from any public life despite the fact that her husband had been working on a commission from the European Council to compose music for a new ‘European’ anthem. Julie claims the unfinished work and destroys the score after meeting her husband’s collaborator Olivier (Benoît Régent) at her country house and sleeping with him. Thereafter she withdraws to an ‘out of the way’ apartment in Paris. But gradually she becomes aware of other people and gets involved in their lives. Eventually she will reconnect with Olivier and finish the composition which we understand she may well have co-written from the beginning.

The trilogy

The idea for the trilogy came from Krzysztof Piesiewicz who suggested repeating the idea of the Dekalog (which had used the Ten Commandments as a starting point), but this time taking the French flag and its embodiment of the revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité. The intention was that these concepts should not be explored on a political or philosophical level, but on a personal one. Bleu is intended as a film about liberté, but specifically about ‘emotional’ liberté. Julie, who suffers a double tragedy at the beginning of the narrative, must find the ‘freedom’ to love again, even to ‘live’ again (as distinct from the freedom to do only what she wants – which the film suggests is no freedom at all). On a second level, the film is about European unity and how it can be expressed through music, so Julie will find her personal liberté through accepting her role in creating the music. The two films that follow star Julie Delpy in Blanc and Irène Jacob in Rouge. Both Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy appear briefly in their respective ‘other two’ films, but otherwise the stories are not directly connected.

The music The music which Julie must help produce is ‘Song for the Unification of Europe’, based on the Greek text of ‘1 Corinthians 13’ and composed by Zbigniew Preisner. Preisner and Kieślowski had a close working relationship and they invented an eighteenth-century Dutch composer ‘Van den Budenmayer’ who is credited with some of the music in their films. Wikipedia’s entry on Preisner tells us:

Zbigniew Preisner studied history and philosophy in Kraków. Never having received formal music lessons, he taught himself about music by listening and transcribing parts from records. His compositional style represents a distinctively spare form of tonal neo-Romanticism. Paganini and Jean Sibelius are acknowledged influences.

Music as symbol and object The music in the film is important in three different ways. First it functions conventionally as a score which complements the visual image at certain times in order to confirm and emphasise the emotional impact of a scene. However, this basic function is superseded by its importance as the object of Julie’s quest and by its symbolic function. As an object – that which Julie must enable to be performed – the ‘Song for the Unification of Europe’ has to be ‘presented’ to the audience as something in its own right artistically. Therefore something odd is required – we must ‘hear’ the music as Julie remembers it and ‘finishes’ it. (The narrative intrigues us to the extent to which Julie is indeed the original composer of her husband’s music.) The music that we hear on the soundtrack is diegetic in the sense that it belongs to the fictional world of the film, but we rarely see the music being performed (i.e. confirming its diegetic status). Instead we hear what is inside Julie’s head – or her memory. We will want to think about the scene, for instance, when the camera offers us close-ups of the notes as each is played and Julie traces along the score with her finger. We could argue that the music becomes a character in the film’s narrative, like a child which is finally born in the closing scenes of the film. There are several film genres in which something similar might happen.

The two most obvious are the music documentary when the film traces the development of a particular musical work or the musical biopic when specific compositions are examined in relation to the development of the musical composer or performer. Bleu, however, is unusual for the specific role of the music and its resonance in terms of the meaning of the film. Bleu is very definitely an ‘art film’ in which the filmmakers’ mastery of their crafts is moulded (melded?) into a perfect whole. In this sense, music is an element of film language in a film which uses each of the elements in a symbolic way and requires that they complement each other in the meanings that they produce. This is an aim in most mainstream films, but often with the intention that complementary elements should lose their ‘difference’ – that we shouldn’t notice music or cinematography or editing etc. as separate elements, but should succumb to ‘narrative continuity’. In Bleu, the opposite is the case. Each element is used in an expressionistic manner.

Bleu is a ‘blue’ movie! Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak designed special camera filters to render specific scenes in a blue light. The costume design and production design aim to think about blue as a focus and play down red. The mise en scène includes blue objects – such as the light shade that Julie keeps when she clears the country house. As well as colour the camera compositions are notable for the number of big close- ups such as when Julie drops a sugar cube into a cup of coffee. Kieślowski has suggested that he wanted to express Julie’s complete focus on very small aspects of her own world – not the world around her. (In this scene, the flautist busker plays a tune that she will later notice.) The editing style adopted for the film includes slow fades to black and the black screen is held for a few seconds (during which the music sometimes plays). Other fades break the convention that they represent ‘time passing’ as there are examples in the film of fades which effectively ‘stop time’. Much of this seems to be related to Julie’s outlook.

Expressionist film attempts to express the inner feelings of characters through the appearance of the character and the setting – combined with the use of music. What does ‘blue’ mean psychologically in Western cultures? Two basic meanings spring to mind. ‘Blue’ is associated with coldness and to some extent with stillness – but it also connotes sadness. Does Julie seek to withdraw, to suppress her sense of loss? The trick of the script is to change the expressive nature of ‘blue’ towards emotional freedom.

The music in the film must match the intensity/focus offered by cinematography, mise en scène, editing and performance. Kieślowski said that he didn’t really know about music. He therefore trusted Preisner explicitly, not only to write appropriate music but also to know where the music needed to appear in the narrative. In this sense, the pairing was not unlike Hitchcock-Herrmann – except that Kieślowski and Preisner were much more able to get along amicably. In his contemporary review Derek Malcolm called the music being composed in the film “bombastic”. I’m not really competent to comment on the music itself, only to say that I think it works in this context. Juliette Binoche seems like perfect casting for the role of Julie. Not only beautiful and serene, but also clearly intelligent and strong, she posses all the qualities to be able to work with the script and make credible her character in the narrative. Only in her late twenties when she made the film, ‘la Binoche’ was already being discussed as a star after her roles in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Wuthering Heights (1992) and Les amants du Pont Neuf (1991). Watching Bleu again now, we are more aware of how she has come to dominate the interesting roles provided by directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien (e.g. Le voyage du ballon rouge (France-Taiwan 2007), Abbas Kiarostami (i.e. Certified Copy (France-Italy-Belgium-Iran, 2010) and more recently Claire Denis (Let the Sunshine In (France-Belgium 2017). In Bleu, what her performance conveys is a stillness, a strength and a minimalism – all of which gradually ‘melt’ away as she becomes able to develop emotional relationships again. Re-watching the film again in 2025 is to be forcibly reminded of Binoche’s performance and this time I was much more aware of the ‘bob’, that hair style that seems so iconic across all of cinema, but especially French cinema and links Binoche in this role to Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie and Louise Brooks in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box from Weimar Germany. Juliette Binoche is a truly international star actor who has worked with directors from across the world. She embodies the optimism of a new Europe presented through Kieslowski’s vision in Three Colours Blue – if only we could be optimistic now in the face of Trump! Resources Wikipedia has a useful general page on the film with some links: Three Colours Blue Preisner’s own website has samples of his music: http://www.preisner.com/ Other Preisner sites are listed as links on www.musicolog.com/preisner.asp Kieślowski discusses the trilogy briefly in this book, first published in 1993: Danusia Stock (ed) (1995) Kieślowski on Kieślowski, London: Faber and Faber