ABSTRACT
Cultural associations with the colour red are potent in the Western world. They include blood and intense passion, linking to injury and death on one wing of a diptych and to love and life on the other. These connections and others resonate through Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red as authentic indications of its themes. Like Blue and White, Red commences with raw noise running behind the opening title card in this case, the racket of drenching rain. That gives way, when a man calls an international number, to a collage of digital sound's woven into myriad voices. In Blue, Julie uses the telephone as a means of initiating loving intimacy with Olivier. Dominique, on the contrary, deploys her phone in White callously to humiliate her ex-husband Karol Karol. Julie and Karol in Paris and Valentine in Geneva each see a bent ancient struggling to push a bottle into a recycling bank.
