The young Krzysztof Kieślowski studied at the Theater Technology High School in Warsaw, and it was then that he fell deeply in love with theater. He decided to become a theater director, and since a university degree was required to study at the State Higher Theater School, he decided to apply to the Film School in Łódź. Although he ultimately did not work on the stage, his oeuvre includes several plays he directed for Television Theatre. This remains the least known and least described part of his artistic output.
The ATTK collection in Sokołowsko contains the scripts of these television adaptations of plays, including Kieślowski’s handwritten notes, comments, and drawings. These are truly unique items. They include the director’s adaptation of Zofia Posmysz’s play Snares, which was finally produced by Polish Television in 1972 under the title Permission to Shoot. In its message, it is a work close to Kieślowski’s Personnel (1975) and Calm (1976), sharp, critical, even provocative. Perhaps it is because of this message, which resounds to the end in the last words of the play (“People! Lean out! It’s worth sticking your neck out!”) that it was never shown on television?
In the same year, Kieślowski made an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game, a story about an individual subjected to the pressure of a totalitarian system. It took the form of a monodrama performed by Michał Pawlicki, which was broadcast under the title Checkmate.
In June 1976, Kieślowski made an adaptation of William Gibson’s famous play Two on a Seesaw, starring Maja Komorowska and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. As in his previous productions, Kieślowski used solutions transferred from the film set to the television studio and editing room. When reading the text of this play in the comfort of the Sokołowsko archive, it is worth referring to the scripts of The Decalogue for comparison, to find the answer to the question: what do they have in common? And they certainly do. The same applies to Kieślowski’s televised adaptation of Tadeusz Różewicz’s The Card Index. Shot like a film – with a handheld camera, on location in Warsaw, and in a cramped apartment in the district of Ursynów – it vividly evokes the spaces familiar from the The Decalogue.
When, in 1979, the year Różewicz’s play was adapted for television, Waldemar Chołodowski asked Kieślowski: “Are you interested in film as film?”, Kieślowski replied: “I would write. If I could. Film images are too literal. I would write for the theater…”.