I saw Blue for the first time when I was in film school. I checked out a VHS tape from the library and watched it on a twelve-inch TV/VCR. The movie finished and I sat staring at the dark screen while the tape auto-rewound. When it reached the beginning, I pressed “Play” and watched it a second time. When it stopped the second time, I turned everything off, went to bed, and stared at the ceiling. A week or so later, I finished the trilogy and thought, If these are called movies, we need a new name for everything else.







I’ve never seen music sewn through film so deeply, as if the actors were thinking the soundtrack while they were acting. However he did it, Kieślowski caught the chaos of being human without the mania (for instance, the elderly woman carefully disposing of recyclables). His films are life-affirming for the jaded—they are the smartest and sexiest of unintentionally philosophical films, never talking down or forgetting to entertain. And the ending of Red—well, isn’t that the ending of everything?