Double Lives: Europe and Identity in the Later Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski

Abstract

The collapse of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to a gradual political and cultural rapprochement between Eastern and Western Europe which continues to gather pace. In May 1991, Václav Havel declared that Europe might at last be able to realize ‘the age-old hope of becoming an area of friendship and co-operation for all its inhabitants’ and that East Europeans were seeking to return to a civilization that they had helped to develop. ‘This is not just a question of…being fascinated by another world’, continued Havel. ‘It is just the opposite. After decades of unnaturally following the wrong track, we are yearning to rejoin the road which was once ours too.’¹ Statements such as this, while aimed at reasserting the dream of a common European home stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, have instead served to give the political debate concerning Europe and European identity an even greater urgency than previously. This issue is a particularly pressing one since, at the time of writing (Autumn 1996), the European Union looks set to expand eastwards over the next twenty years, to embrace a whole swathe of former Communist states, from Estonia in the Baltic to Bulgaria in the Balkans. As many commentators have pointed out, such expansion will bring with it a whole range of political, legal, economic and social problems.²