annalee

Thank you for the lovely comments so far, you always write such nice things on my sets like that the pictures are poetic or classy and that really means a lot to me. This is my new set in MR shot by P_mod and it was inspired by the film La double vie de Veronique by Krzysztof Kieslowski and the beautiful cinematography by Sawomir Idziak. I hope you like it... and fingers crossed SG do too :-) I think P_mod did an amazing job getting the mood and colour and lighting right. The quote in the introduction is from Kieslowski and here are some quotes from the essay on the film by Slavoj Zizek that I think are very interesting.

The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.





This unfinished character of reality grounds our freedom of choice: it depends on us which version will prevail. For Kieslowski, this choice is ultimately the choice between calm life and vocation. In The Double Life of Veronique, the Polish Weronika chooses her vocation, that of a singer, ignoring her heart failure, and meets early death as the result of it, while the French Veronique betrays her vocation and chooses a quiet, satisfied life. Veronique is thus melancholic and reflective, in contrast to Weronikas direct enthusiasm for the Cause; to put it in Friedrich Schillers terms, she is sentimental, in contrast to Weronikas naivete.



So in The Double Life of Veronique, perhaps, we are not dealing with the mystery of the communication between two Veroniques but with one and the same Veronique who travels back and forth in time. In these terms, the key scene in the film is the near encounter of the two Veroniques in the large square in Krakow, where a Solidarity demonstration is taking place. This episode is rendered in a vertiginous circular shot reminiscent of the famous 360-degree shot from Hitchcocks Vertigo. Afterward, when the French Veronique is introduced, we can understand Polish Weronikas perplexity as arising from an obscure awareness that she was about to have an impossible encounter with her double. The cameras circular movement, then, can be read as signaling the danger of the end of the world, like the standard scene from science-fiction films about alternative realities, in which the passage from one to another universe takes the shape of a terrifying primordial vortex threatening to swallow all consistent reality.