Krzysztof
Kieślowski's Dekalog is a separate work. Its output in restored copy (digital
2K) by MK2 honors all the cinematographic value of what its director has
called "the television cycle that uses the practices of the series",
intended for broadcast on Polish public television (TVP) in 1989. Only Dekalog n°5 and n°6, entitled Brief love story were the subject of an extended format
for theatrical release. However, the cycle was presented out of competition at the
Venice Film Festival in September 1989 and then theatrically released,
sometimes in one go to capture it in its entirety.
These ten
films make up a panopticon of the Ten Commandments taken from the Old
Testament: ten episodes of less than an hour are devoted to characters from a
group of buildings in Warsaw placed in ethical situations and choices. The
image of the panopticon seems in fact particularly appropriate to characterize
The Decalogue, constituting a prison architectural model allowing a guard housed
in a central tower to observe all the prisoners locked in cells around it, and
without them- they can know that they are being observed.
If The Dekalog n°5 takes place in its last portion in prison, the overall arrangement chosen by Kieślowski can come close to it: the director is able to represent this guard with the camera as a tower, filming in heart of a group of buildings and in the city too, and relayed by the character of an unknown observer present in each film except the last. The characters are seen and observed through the windows of the buildings - and sometimes locked in the frame -, as in Dekalog n°6 devoted to voyeurism and the desire which is related to it. If this model accounts for the feeling of invisible omniscience created, it is because we can in fact apprehend it as a form of divine point of view, a sort of control tower which also opens the cycle with the example of the computer programmed by the little boy, Pawel, who is a scientific avatar of it.
This modern panopticon located in a group of buildings is nonetheless constantly evolving, in the manner of Kieślowski's camera: in frontal turning before a low angle (opening of Dekalog n°1), descending and vertiginous ( opening of Dekalog n°7 ), sinuous ( opening if Dekalog n°8 ), it reflects a life that is itself moving, as well as its representation, subject to variations in points of view , and an often rapid assembly with a continuity difficult to understand.
Variety of
vices and virtues that The Decalogue maps out, the ten commandments
constituting a written set of moral and religious instructions, we must however
see more not a prescriptive dimension, but an ethical, empathic and humanist,
as commented by its director: “If I had to give the essential message of the
Dekalog, it would be: Live with respect, look around you, take care that
your actions do not cause harm to others, do not hurt or cause them pain.”
Although anchored in the Poland of the 1980s, the horizon of the Dekalog is
universal, and its scope, existential. In fact, this film-world endeavors, no
more and no less, to ask each of us the question "How (better) to
live?" ". Hence the urgency to (re)watch it.
The Ten Commandments are ten words that Kieślowski declines and exemplifies in ten episodes, each one while part of a series. They are introduced by the disturbingly melancholy music of Zbigniew Preisner who repeats his three notes from the opening after a silence, then varies them over the course of the episodes. Kieślowski proceeds by variation, gradation, seriation, in situations and in the filming of an episode to another, and sets abyss so satirical and entertaining the notion of “series” and “series on the Dekalog” in ultimate episode You shall not covet the property of others: opening to the song of a metal band whose lyrics are the very opposite of the ten commandments, the last word is “series”. Here the term refers nevertheless realize that the two brothers had each bought separately three stamps in memory of their father philatelist - the same in reality - and thus aligning their two identical corresponding series. If the film does not show the letter to the commandments but sometimes several at once, you still need to read them, as proposed by Slavoj Žižek, offset by the commandments which they relate.
this
non-explicit literal bias makes it possible to account for a reading at several
levels and the mesh of meanings at work in reality. The Dekalog draws on it in
fact: each episode is inspired by real events, and mainly by events in the life
of Kieślowski or Piesiewicz, co-writer and lawyer by training. In Dekalog n°8,
Zofia, professor of ethics at the university, significantly takes as an example
in his seminar an example taken from the reality of a “strange building”,
because “in in every building there are lots of people with lots of problems”.
The idea behind the Dekalog dates back to 1983, before the filming of No End
(1985) where Krzysztof Piesiewicz offered Kieślowski to film the Ten
Commandments after seeing a 15th century polyptych at the National Gallery in
Warsaw (originally from Gdansk where it has since been replaced) which was
dedicated to it, divided into ten painted scenes of everyday life. These ten
commandments, illustrated and placed in series, allow us to discuss the
relevance to contemporary life that Kieślowski still apprehends in the light of
ethical questions dealt with by the Polish sociologist and philosopher Maria
Ossowska. These scenes from everyday life are exemplary, moral tales, but are
by no means exemplary.
Filming life
with an almost documentary bias amounts to taking into account its complexity,
its contingency, its illegibility, as the many obstructions in the field can
testify. Kieślowski also reveals all the shattering of the vision of reality by
resorting to specular games: in Dekalog n°5 a magnificent shot films in its
left portion a building extended in the right portion by what turns out to be
its image. reflected in a glass door. This reality mediated by panes, specular
reality, baroque, diffracted, distorted (by framing and angles) or altered (by
yellow-green filters used for example in Dekalog n°5) is shown more in its
opacity than its transparency: This is evidenced in particular by the covers
and misty parts in the frame. It oscillates between the tears of the tragic in
the first episode and the laugh of the comic in the last. This principle can be
the object of a treasure hunt, as Dekalog n°3 where Ewa plays the comedy on
Christmas Eve with her former lover, Janusz, making her believing that her
husband is missing, when she is hopelessly alone. The Dekalog thus presents
itself as a divine tragicomedy, expressing something of our world, of our
existence, of ourselves according to the characters that we see from one
episode to another, in close-up when the episode is dedicated to them or as a
backdrop when the angle has changed and they are relegated to a form of
anonymity mixed with recognition.
In short, The Decalogue shows a miniaturized, condensed life, to be understood in its parts and in its totality. It is a child who tragically dies in Dekalog n°1, while the object of Dekalog n°2 is to save an unborn birth. Between life and death, as well represented by plants (the plant from which Dorota tears the leaves in Dekalog n°2) and animals (the dead fish in the aquarium in Dekalog n°10), The Decalogue makes the praise of everything that keeps beings alive in view of its fragility: whether it is the beauty of the world and its reversibility that Kieślowski scrutinizes in the smallest detail acquiring the status of close-up or love for people we care about and who haunt us when they are no longer there, as in Dekalog n°5: we see Jacek committing a crime in cold blood, but above all we learn that an infinite injury and guilt animate him , those of the death of his little sister, of which he is concerned to enlarge the photo of communicant for his mother. A beautiful formula is stated when he orders the photograph: can we see in a photo whether the person is dead or alive? Thanks to the mystery of the photo which preserves the imprint of the person, Kieślowski gives all its weight to the image, and to the image of loved ones: it is Pawel who runs on a screen in the prologue of the first episode, before his face comes to freeze and crash into the screen. If the freezing of the image represents the death to come of the little boy, which has already happened in reality and of which the film constitutes the time before, it also accounts for the survival of loved ones and the communication between beings. and the images: it is a sharing of tears that circulate from Pawel's aunt facing the screen to those of the unknown observer in front of us.
Kieślowski
pays particular attention to the medium, a space for bringing together beings
and affects. Although characterized by an often sharp, obtuse editing, his
cinema praises the bond, love in its various facets: filial in Dekalog n°1 or
Dekalog n°7 where we see the distress of a mother who is not recognized as such
but relegated to the status of sister, which Dekalog n°8 then pursues posing a
form of filiation by substitution since a woman having lost a son finds a kind
of daughter in the little Jewish girl whom she had not helped to save during
the war, and the taboo of incest in Dekalog n°4; in love in Dekalog n°3, where
an old couple spends a night wandering around Warsaw, love that can reach a
sick, voyeuristic form in Dekalog n°6; conjugal with the question of adultery
in Dekalog n°2, extended in Dekalog n°9, and associated with impotence; or even
fraternal in Dekalog n°5, and Dekalog n°10.
The love in
question is in the heart - and not between the thighs as Hanka tells her
helpless husband Roman in Dekalog n°9, a maxim the film exemplifies. This model
of deep love is expressed from Dekalog n°1, during the conversation between
Pawel and his aunt, initiated from a question asked by the little boy about
prints of a photo of John Paul II: “Do you think he knows what we live for?” And
her aunt replied: “Yes. I think yes. And Pawel went further, “Dad told me that
we live so that those who come after us will have an easier time, but that we
don't always succeed. Then her aunt says, “Living is the joy of doing something
for others, of helping them. If you do for someone good, you don't feel
worthless, and immediately it gets better. There are big and small things (…).
To live ... it is a wonderful gift ...” This desire for good is connected by
Pawel's aunt to God, whose love is manifested in the embrace, represented by
the kiss of Pawel by his aunt. In the manner of the helpless observer who is at
the same time compassionate by his tender gaze, or in the manner of the
empathetic camera towards those whom it films, God represents this loving,
merciful heart, which is there but to which we do not lend. not be careful, and
against which we revolt because he left a child to die as is the case of
Pawel's father in the finale of Dekalog n°1.
Large
polyptych in the shape of a panopticon allowing a multiplication of points of
view, Dekalog is always as close as possible to a full understanding of each
individual, his motivations, his past, his personal sufferings, posing a
fruitful tension between individuality and universality, guilt and sympathy -according
to its etymological meaning. Each situation, each character, is overturned by
their reverse shot and their out of shot, and are dialectized in order to cast
a comprehensive, empathetic gaze on them. If no lesson is delivered and
everyone walks and status according to these situations put against an ethical
precept, it is because a form of compassion deeply animates The Dekalog which
seeks its heart: far from responding dogmatically, the exchange between Zofia,
the Catholic woman, from the Dekalog n°8, who did not help a little Jewish girl
during the war, and Elzbieta, the woman she became, gives some keys, putting in
abyss the fundamental questioning of the work:
Elzbieta: How do you
respond when your students ask you how to live?
Zofia: I'm not
responding, I'm working with them so they can find themselves.
Elzbieta: What?
Zofia: Good. It
exists. It exists in every man. It is the situation that releases good or bad
in him. That night she didn't release the good in me.
Elzbieta: Who judges?
Zofia: The one we
have in us.
Elzbieta: In your
work, I did not find the word "God".
Zofia: I don't go
to church, I don't talk about God, but you can't doubt without talking about
it. Man is free, he can choose. If he wants to, he can leave God behind. "
If The
Decalogue has been qualified as a cinema of doubt, like Zofia, Kieślowski, by
presenting a series of states of life, tones and beliefs, does not deliver an
answer: it nevertheless works with us, its films work in us, for us to find
ourselves. And this is in a way what the director will express about the film Trois
Couleurs: Rouge (1994) and that we can already consider at work here: “I
made this film, to say that we maybe we can live our life better.” His cinema
is a good way to live (better).
Check out Dekalog review of all episodes here :
• Dekalog Ten: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Nine: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Eight: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Seven: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Six: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Five: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Four: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Three: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog Two: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
• Dekalog One: Krzysztof Kieślowski Mini Serie review
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