"I" Seeing the "Other": Dialogic Subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieślowski's 'Three Colours' Trilogy

Abstract

The central aim of this thesis is to study the representation of subjectivity in cinema. The object of the analysis is the trilogy Three Colours: Blue, White, and Red, produced between 1992 and 1994 by the Polish director Kryzstof Kieślowski (1941-1996). The thesis seeks to demonstrate how a Bakhtinian reading of Blue, White and Red can help us discover the deeper theoretical implications conveyed in the trilogy and understand how cinematic subjectivity transcends the realm of experiential reality – that is, the dramatised immediacy of emotion - while also encompassing an ethical dimension. In this respect, Kieślowski's films demonstrate the wider potential of cinema to represent a profound and subtle sense of human subjectivity, in its complex nuances, that surpasses the sensationalism of human emotional drama. To achieve this aim, this study is structured around the exploration of the key question: "How does Kieślowski's trilogy dramatise the inner life in its ethical dimensions?" In offering an answer to this question, specific concepts adapted from the work of Mikhail Bahktin will be used. In exploring this question, then, Three Colours: Blue, White, and Red will be examined from the perspective of how these films, through the interplay of their narrative, stylistic, formal, and thematic elements, map out the space of otherness in relation to the main characters, in a way that evokes the human condition in terms of interpersonal relationships that are also the crux of the ethics. The study will demonstrate how the inner lives of the characters in the trilogy are dramatised through the foregrounding of dialogic subjectivity where the meaning of one's self is constructed through the interaction between self and other. In this respect, the treatment of subjectivity is not simply a matter of valorising characters as "individuals" – whether heroes or otherwise. The thesis explores the ethical valorisation of the characters’ intersubjectivity in the trilogy, and it is here that Bakhtin's philosophical conception of dialogic subjectivity, adapted to study cinematic processes of representation, informs its methodology and argument.