The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 12-18
Talking Heads (1980)
Directed by Krzystof Kieślowski
Kieślowski is known best today for the intricate, interlaced fiction films that he made during the decade prior to his 1996 death—delicately tactile films that explored humanity’s place in the cosmos through nuanced tales of people facing everyday choices that might affect the rest of their lives. He was, however, one of the great documentary filmmakers well before he directed his first fiction feature. The short works that he made between 1966 and 1980—each one, in some way, a portrait film of his native Poland—captured ordinary people at extraordinary moments, which were precisely the moments of filming. In a Kieślowski doc, one can feel the filmmaker and his subjects approach each other with rare insight and sympathy, leading to mutually transformative encounters.
The 15-minute-long Talking Heads was Kieślowski’s penultimate documentary. It will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in a program containing the same year’s Railway Station as well as five lovely shorts made prior to them. As with all of his nonfiction works, the premise of Talking Heads is simple. More than forty Polish citizens born across different years and from all walks of life are asked three questions: “Who are you?” “Where are you from?” “What do you want from life?” Each person is given one close-up from which to offer a self-register. The youngest interviewee, appearing first, is one year old; the oldest, appearing last, is one hundred; and both of them and all the ones in between share with the camera a spirit of hope. Aaron Cutler (October 15, 2pm as part of the “Polish Lives” documentary shorts program within the Museum of the Moving Image’s Kieslowski retrospective)