Mirror Images in "The Double Life of Véronique"
Abstract
Krzysztof Kieślowski was a world-class French director of Polish descendant whose early documentaries had a strong realistic style, and his later work, represented by the Red, White, and Blue Trilogy, showed a strong personal style and philosophical thinking of human beings. The Double Life of Véronique is his transition work, essential in the shift from Poland to the West. The use of mirrors as imagery and the mirror-parallel structure of the two women's stories become an essential way to express the core of the film. This paper will analyze the film's audio-visual language and mirror expressions, starting from the mirror and the mirror-parallel structure, to reveal how Kieślowski uses virtual images and metaphors to express the universal experience of women as subjectivity in the film—using Jacques Lacan's mirror stage to illustrate how Weronika and Véronique establish their subjectivity. Also, Krzysztof Kieślowski created several layers of mirror relationships, all of which apply to the crystal of time of Gilles Deleuze's theory.
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