The New Serial Cinema

Step aside, "Harry Potter" -- how things like the "Pusher" and "Red Riding" trilogies reinvent the idea of the series.

But if Kieślowski’s using this approach to inspire age-old questions about whether spiritual forces or free will determines the course of our lives, the “Red Riding Trilogy” uses its multiple, labyrinthine narratives to build an ominous sense of interrelated powers on the ground — the police, the wealthy, the government, religious authority — exerting control over the characters. Issues of fate and chance have given way to Machiavellian conspiracy.

Another aspect of multitudinous narratives is that they “engender memory,” explains Insdorf. “Even if it is possible for the viewer to appreciate one ‘Decalogue’ episode — or one trilogy “Color” — in and of itself, how much richer when s/he ties together the narrative strands in an active manner. Kieślowski makes us more alert as viewers,” she continues, “not only while watching his films, but in reflecting upon them afterwards.”

The “Red Riding Trilogy” functions similarly, forcing its audience to think back on what they’ve seen prior and attend to the uncanny echoes among the films. But the “Red Riding” films are also explicitly about remembering, whether it’s the characters recalling their past and trying to repent or seek retribution for it, or a larger British national memory. It’s no coincidence that the films are set in the ’70s and ’80s, and skillfully knit real-life events into their fictions (like an actual serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper).

In an essay comparing Kieślowski’s “Decalogue” with the TV series “Lost” and “Six Feet Under,” English professor Sean O’Sullivan describes the central subjects of all three programs as “religion, death and memory” — a triad that defines the “Red Riding” films as well. For O’Sullivan, these themes abound in plenty of other art forms, but rather than seek to resolve the issues “within limited frames,” these serial stories transform them “into lived anxieties played out for both characters and viewers over alternating gaps and appearances.”

In adapting the “Red Riding” books, Grisoni says he hoped to create something “closer to one’s experience of reality” — evoking, perhaps, that sense of “lived anxiety” — by not doing much planning or drafting treatments. “It’s not about writing a drama as if it’s a board game,” he says. Rather, he created them “in a much looser, organic way, so you never feel there’s a formula at work and things are not tied up like in life. I was desperate to preserve that and keep that going.”

As illustration, Grisoni offers up an anecdote about the ancient concept of applause. “The idea is that at the end you applaud to break up the drama that’s been created — to shatter the illusion — to allow yourself to return to your life,” he says. “But what if you concoct a drama where there is no moment where you can applaud, where you can’t break that web? If you do that, then the drama somehow dovetails with the reality of your life in a very uncomfortable way,” he adds. “And then the ripples continue.”

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