Never Type Direct

I never, usually, type my posts in direct. Yesterday, fresh from watching the mildly annoying Kieslowski film, Blind Chance (which, for some reason, I was confusing with No End), I did a long-ish post on the music, and lost it all just as I was about to publish.

Summer. No-electricity blues.

Nevermore!

(I'm doing it again, actually. There's no end to smugness and the feeling that all life is eternal and we are all invincible and everything will work out if only we can bring ourselves to be sufficiently bloody-minded and WTF, STOP!)

Ok, so, here's what that post was about, minus all the links.

A few minutes into Blind Chance, I found a phrase of music that nagged me through the film. "I know you," I said to it, but it went on its sublime way, ignoring me. I ignored the film in retaliation, because it was where all the Run, Lola, Runs and Sliding Doors and Let's Talks of the world came from. I've no interest anymore in a serial exposition of a moment of simultaneity. At least Kieslowski has the intelligence to avoid a mere series of external event-making: there are some nice moments that take it beyond the banal, but this post is not about that.

It was Kieslowski, so midway through the film, I began to wonder if the music was by Zbignew Priesner. Witek ran after the train for the second time (rather horrifyingly like Lola) and I had dates in my head, wondering when their first collaboration was.

Does this ever happen to you? That when you're in the middle of something - a book, or a film - you find a reference to something else that grabs you by the scruff of your neck and shakes you until you can't really concentrate on anything else until you've been let go of?

This music was it. I was so convinced I'd met it before, rising in operatic, tragic notes. It didn't make sense here, tinkling away in the background, over a guy drinking black tea in a cold, bleak apartment. This music demanded saturated colour and rhythm, insisted on people in the grip of strong emotion.

2046.

I don't know what it was slipped that into my head; maybe an expression of desolation on Witek's face as he reads the note from Vera that says she waited for him four hours and then left. Something familiar in the sense of a person in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person.

So I waited for the titles to roll up. It wasn't Priesner. It was Wojciech Kilar. Yes, I know.

Came and back home and googled 2046, and checked the music credits, especially because I knew Priesner had done some of the music for the film. But nowhere in the music credits was there a mention of Kilar's name. I mean, most of the music in 2046 is a quotation, almost. But this was a little weird. Still is.

It's going to bother me until I watch both films again.

Isn't it wondeful, the way a little, tiny portion of music from early eighties Poland finds its way to early 21st century Hong Kong and keeps some things intact while changing a lot of other things?

And no links. Seriously. This had better not be another waste of my time!