ABSTRACT
As a final example, and by way of a conclusion, let us return to Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy. The three colors, blue, white, and red, from which the three films draw their titles, are the colors of the French flag. What Kieslowski does is this: he separates the colors from their support, the flag. Hence blue is a candy wrapper, but also a window, water, or a coat; white is a wedding veil, but also pigeon droppings, marble, and snow; and red is a dress, but also blood and the hull of a ship. The people, but also the things and animals, drawn along with the colors, are by virtue of these multi-supported trajectories, these roads, brought into communication, indeed into community, but precisely in the absence of identity. They emerge from their journeys not as French or Polish or English or even quite European, nor even as the sum total of all their filmic attributes. They will have been just the drawing into communication of colors linked and assembled by and in the film’s images. It is not clear, politically, where this road gets us. But it is clear that it keeps faith with the difficult political wagers that have characterized, historically, the very best road films.
