Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Short Film About Killing
1988 · Krzysztof Kieślowski · A Short Film About Killing on Sightlines
The light is wrong before anyone does anything. Warsaw in this film is green — standing-water green, the green of meat going off — and the corners of the frame are darkened and smeared, so the picture looks like it is rotting inward from its edges toward whatever is left in the middle. Sławomir Idziak did that with handmade filters, in the camera, at the moment of exposure. Not in a lab afterward. That detail matters more than it sounds: the verdict is baked into the light. You can argue with a speech. You cannot argue with the colour of the air.
Keep the green in mind, because two things happen inside it. A young drifter, Jacek, gets into Waldemar's taxi, has himself driven out of the city, and kills him. Then the state kills Jacek. Both deaths are shown at length. The murder is notorious for refusing to cut away at the beats where films normally cut away, and what the refusal reveals is not horror exactly but difficulty: killing a man with your hands is slow, clumsy work, it goes wrong, and it takes longer than anyone watching wants. The hanging gets the same patience, close to real time, with the procedure and the men who do this for a living. Ewa Smal's editing is the whole argument. Match the two durations and you have said, without saying it, that they are one act.
That is Kieślowski's invention here, and it is a formal one: a moral case conducted in running time. André Bazin had argued decades earlier that there are scenes where cutting is a kind of lie, because the reality of the thing lives in its unbroken duration — hold the shot and you hand the viewer the event plus their own ambiguity about it. Kieślowski takes that and turns it on an institution.
Gilles Deleuze gives us better names for what the green is doing. He never wrote about this film; his cinema books were finished and published before Kieślowski shot Dekalog. But one of his categories fits almost uncomfortably well. Between the close-up of a feeling and the clean action that resolves a situation, Deleuze located a third thing, the impulse-image: cinema not of people who see and act, but of drives that take hold — appetite, compulsion, running below the level of reasons. Its world has two floors. There is the derived milieu, the recognisable social surface, here a taxi rank, a public toilet, peeling institutional corridors, blocks of flats. And there is what he calls the originary world showing through it: raw, wasteful, pre-social, indifferent. Idziak's filtration is that second floor made optical. The rot in the corners isn't mood. It's the claim that this city is a thin crust over something savage.
Take the lens seriously and the film's hardest feature stops looking like a flaw. Jacek has no motive. Mirosław Baka plays him closed and sullen, withholding the interiority that would let you understand him, and conventional drama would call that a missing scene. In the impulse-image nothing is missing. Motive is what the action-image needs; impulse needs only a slope. Deleuze called it the line of slope — the naturalist world runs downhill toward exhaustion and death, and every incident greases the descent. Which is why Kieślowski spends his first act on small cruelties that belong to no plot: a dead animal, casual meanness, people who look away. He isn't planting clues. He's establishing grade.
The circuit that drives most movies — see a situation, act, resolve it — is cut here on purpose. Deleuze called that cut the crisis of the action-image. Piotr, the young defence lawyer, is the one who still believes in the circuit. He acts. He examines, argues, defends, and none of it bends the outcome by a minute; his examination brackets the story at one end and his despair at the other. Krzysztof Globisz plays him as the film's conscience and the film's failure at once, which makes him a seer, Deleuze's voyant: not an agent but a witness who endures what he cannot alter. We watch from behind his eyes. And notice that the film gives away both endings in advance. Suspense is deleted, so attention has nowhere to go but the how.
The how is bodies. Late Deleuze wrote about a cinema of the body, where meaning is carried by posture and duration rather than plot, and here two bodily registers are set against each other. The murder is graceless. The execution is choreographed. His word for a posture that exposes a social relation is the gest, and the gallows sequence is one long gest: the procedure, the functionaries, the paperwork of a death. Killing organised into a job. The film's cruellest suggestion is that the ceremony is the only real difference between the two scenes.
Then it hands you the verdict to make. Deleuze's relation-image is the image whose sense comes from a relation the viewer supplies — the audience as a knowing third party. Kieślowski gives you two long deaths and no summing-up, no editorialising camera move, and Zbigniew Preisner's score keeps out of the way so completely that when it does enter it lands like a bell. The third term — these are the same measure — has to form in you, and nobody on screen will confirm it. That is also why the film holds the shape of a discourse-image, an image posing a problem it cannot solve. It never states whether the state's killing differs in kind. It only refuses to let you hold the two apart.
The debts are specific. From Bresson's L'Argent, a chain of transactions ending in an off-hand, de-dramatised murder, and the affectless model-performance that withholds motive: Baka is Bressonian to the bone. From In Cold Blood, Conrad Hall's documentary coldness toward both the killing and the gallows — the rain running down the condemned man's face like tears — the precedent for making crime and punishment two matched, unbearable deaths. From El Verdugo, capital punishment argued through bureaucratic mechanics instead of speeches. From Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, the trial-to-execution spine carried by austere close framing of a suffering face rather than exposition. From Bergman's Winter Light, the refusal of musical consolation that Preisner formalises. And behind all of it the Polish School, Ashes and Diamonds, where a killing arrived charged with chiaroscuro and national reckoning.
What it passed on is partly a career and partly a permission. The Cannes Jury Prize and the first European Film Award opened Kieślowski's work, and late-1980s Polish cinema with it, to the world; the trick of expanding a television commission into a feature gave us A Short Film About Love alongside it. More durably, any film that now holds a death past the point of comfort and declines to offer an innocent to pity is arguing in a grammar this one sharpened. Kieślowski closed the escape route that anti-capital-punishment films had always left open. No wronged innocent here. A repellent crime, a repellent procedure, and a lawyer who cannot bear it.
Which leaves the question the film's own method opens and does not close. To make his case, Kieślowski had to make us do the thing he condemns: watch a killing all the way through, twice, without looking away. Does that make us better, or only implicated? Watch it again and time the two deaths against each other. Watch the corners of the frame closing in. Then watch Piotr's face, and decide whether what you feel is judgment or complicity.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — The staging "refuses to grant the murder a motive or a catharsis: violence arrives without the psychological scaffolding conventional drama would supply"; Baka's performance withholds the interiority that would let an audience "understand" the crime.
- originary-world — Idziak's handmade green/yellow filters and heavy vignetting make the image "rot inward from its corners," producing a world that "looks physically toxic, as though the light itself were spoiled" — the grimy city read as the crust over something savage.
- derived-milieu — The concrete social surface Kieślowski builds from institutional and urban decay — peeling walls, courtrooms, a taxi rank, a public toilet, the cramped geometry of late-communist Warsaw.
- entropy / degradation — The early sections are a "mosaic of small, seemingly incidental cruelties and indifferences (a dead animal, casual meanness, indifferent passersby)" accreting into a coarsened society, and three lives converge "with a sense of grim inevitability" on two deaths.
- affective colour — The green-tinged, sickly palette "bleeds the city of any warmth; skies are curdled, interiors are stained" — achieved photochemically at the moment of exposure rather than in post, so the moral atmosphere is rendered optically.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Kieślowski "strips the crime of motive and the drama of suspense — we know the murder will happen, we know the sentence will be death" — and Piotr's defence, examination and anguish change nothing about the outcome.
- voyant — Globisz's Piotr, the idealistic defence lawyer whose "anguish over his failure to save his client" becomes the film's moral centre: a witness who endures rather than an agent who acts.
- attitudes & postures — The editing holds "on the ugliness and duration of the act, forcing the viewer to register how difficult, prolonged, and physically graceless killing actually is," with the murder's unstable claustrophobia set against the coldly procedural execution.
- the-gest — "The bureaucratic choreography of the gallows unfolds in near-real time" — the state's relation to a body laid out as ceremony and job rather than dramatized as an act.
- the mental-image — "The dramatic engine is not plot but juxtaposition — the demand that the viewer hold two killings side by side and judge them by the same measure," with restrained, observational cutting and a sparing score that decline to editorialize.
- discourse-image — The film is "better understood as a moral tragedy or philosophical polemic in narrative form," bracketing the story with "the question of whether the state's killing differs in kind from the murderer's" without answering it.