Blind Chance
| Cast: | Witek (Witold) Długosz | Bogusław Linda |
| Story 1: | Werner, the old Communist | Tadeusz Łomnicki |
| Adam, Witek's slick Party sponsor | Zbigniew Zapasiewicz | |
| Czuszka, Witek's first love | Bogusława Pavelec | |
| Story 2: | Marek, Witek's friend from the work crew | Jacek Borkowski |
| Stefan, the priest in a wheelchair | Adam Ferency | |
| Daniel, Witek's (Jewish) boyhood friend | Jacek Sas-Uchrynowski | |
| Werka (Vera), Daniel's sister | Marzena Trybała | |
| Story 3: | Olga, Witek's wife | Monika Goździk |
| Dean of the Medical Faculty | Zbigniew Hübner | |
| Witek's aunt | Irena Byrska |
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996) was one of the most distinctive of the middle generation of Polish filmmakers whose films constitute "the cinema of moral concern" of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Kieślowski contributed three monuments to Polish cinema during this time:
Camera Buff (1979), his first feature film (after working in documentaries and television); Blind Chance (1981), made during the brief Solidarity period but suppressed by the martial-law regime for six years before being shown; and No End (1984), a film of and about the martial law period. Together these three films convey a strong picture of the Polish world of those years -- its politics, but also the human dimensions of lives lived among its frustrations and falseness. Kieślowski was known for his "uncompromising moral stance," as one critic put it. His later films -- Decalogue (ten hour-length films exploring the Ten Commandments) and the three-film series Blue, White and Red (the colors of the French flag) -- have less political content and are more exclusively addressed to moral and aesthetic issues. He died in 1996.The story begins in the spring of 1977 and ends in July of 1980 -- just as the strikes of that summer were breaking out. These, then, are the last bitter years of Edward Gierek's inept regime, when most Poles regarded the system with contempt, or at best indifference. Some were gathering themselves into dissident organizations that were trying to imagine and create a better future: examples mentioned are the Flying University, the Free Trade Unions, and samizdat (a Russian word for underground publishing). It's the world out of which the Solidarity movement was born. For a Pole watching the film in the 1980s there would be a strong sense of history in suspension, with something about to happen -- but not yet begun.
Witek, the film's protagonist, is a fifth-year medical student in Łódż when the story begins. After several minutes of (as it were) prologue, the film's story branches: we watch Witek's life develop in three quite different ways depending on the chance outcome of his dash to catch a departing train to Warsaw. (It's not hard to follow -- each story is brought to its end before the next one starts.) While we are likely to regard Witek's divergent lives as most simply understood and described in terms of politics (i.e., as types of political existence in the Poland of that time), and this is not wrong, the director has more in mind than this. In spite of radically different lives, Witek remains the same, quite decent human being -- a point which Kieślowski emphasized in his own discussions of the film. But the interplay of chance and determinacy give him three quite different life stories, with different occupations, friends, and significant others, and different consciousness. See what you can make out of it!