ABSTRACT
In the photographs which accompany Stok's text, an anxious infant Kieslowski can be seen sheltered by his mother in a hood and cape. In another image, slightly older, he is pictured with his mother and his sister at a sanatorium. Throughout his cinema, indeed, Kieslowski works both to correlate and to confuse the memory image and the cinematic image to such an extent that any divisions between actual and virtual, subjective and objective, personal and public are denied. Reading Kieslowski through Deleuze has allowed specific focus on the historical and aesthetic context of Kieslowski's cinema. A dialectics of sameness and difference returns where Kieslowski's cinema may be seen to explore the temporal disruption and the imperfect repetitions of traumatic re-enactment. Individual desires and emotions are caught in the frame of Kieslowski's filmmaking, where betrayal and the very risks of representation are all too frequently his subject. Kieslowski's French cinema is a cinema of willed exile, a cinema at one remove.
