ABSTRACT

Film as fictional narrative affords the possibility of constructing an overtly subjective vision, of exploring the ways in which any view of the world is necessarily partial and filtered. This growing emphasis, in Kieslowski's cinema, marks a move from an interest in the world viewed to an interest, in particular, in voyeurism. Kieslowski's analysis of voyeurism is most protracted in A Short Film about Loue, the sixth film of Decalogue, which was also released in a longer version for the cinema. In the first place, then, Kieslowski's cinema appears literally and simply to invert the terms of sadism and masochism, activity and passivity of the relation between voyeur and exhibitionist. But this is by no means all that Blanc achieves in its imbrication of voyeurism and futurity. Kieslowski effectively returns to the model of desiring and viewing relations both constructed and represented in narrative cinema and heterosexual romance.