Preisner on Kieslowski; L.A. Film Critics Association

The Guardian has a big retrospective article on Krysztof Kieslowski and talks briefly to Zbigniew Preisner.

According to Preisner, Kieslowski’s use of music as an element of the story came from a gradual process of discovery. “To start with,” the composer said, “Krzysztof didn’t really know what he wanted from the music. He used it because it was the way that you used music, and somebody had to write it. On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something different with film music. From that moment, he trusted music more and more. By the time we got to Véronique and Blue, the music was almost the centre of the spectrum.”

Speaking of Preisner, recently I re-compiled a list of L.A. Film Critics Award winners, hopefully to demonstrate how they may actually be worth taking more seriously than the score Oscars. Yeah, I admit I’m fond of LAFCA’s awards because they keep picking scores I happen to be very very fond of (Far From Heaven, A Little Princess, Ed Wood, and The Incredibles among them) and they honor popular composers as well as the obscure. (Horner’s Titanic was the runner-up score for their award in 1997.)

Preisner won the award for three years in a row in the early 90s (for a total of seven different scores), which may or may not have been someone’s enthusiastic overkill of admiration for Kieslowski (and by overflow, Preisner). But again, I was bemused by some of the response I got to this list - namely that any critic who would choose something by Preisner over Schindler’s List clearly was an effete snob. (But ever since the most recent Academy Awards, I have been wondering who the real snobs are…?)