Kieslowski's Decalogue
Broken Commandments, Shattered Lives
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- book About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Language and Silence in Decalogue One
- Chapter 2 The Ruptured World of Decalogue Two
- Chapter 3 Taking the Long Way Home: Decalogue Three
- Chapter 4 The Death of Authority in Decalogue Four
- Chapter 5 Mistakes of a Huge Machine: Murder and Injustice in Decalogue Five
- Chapter 6 Disrupting the Gaze in Decalogue Six
- Chapter 7 Fractured Fairy Tales: Stolen Childhood in Decalogue Seven
- Chapter 8 Dislocated Histories: Bearing Witness in Decalogue Eight
- Chapter 9 Divine Possession: Metaphysical Covetousness in Decalogue Nine
- Chapter 10 A Broken Series: Decalogue Ten
- Index
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to my friends Nicholas Adams and Nick Scudamore, who generously read portions of this study, to the many seminar students whose insights have enriched my understanding of Kieślowski’s enigmatic masterpiece, and to Anthony Mason for his editorial patience. Above all, I owe an unrepayable debt of gratitude to my wife Diane, who has lived with this project for five years and helped nurture it to completion, and to my son Ben “Lochinvar,” whose intellectual investment in The Decalogue is matched only by his joyful irreverence.
Introduction
On a summer day in 2019, six months before the COVID pandemic brought the world to a standstill, a visitor to the Inflancka Housing Project in Warsaw might have had difficulty recognizing the locale of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s extraordinary ten-film cycle, The Decalogue. Joggers wearing designer outfits pass through the guarded entrances of this now-gated community of manicured lawns and vibrant flower boxes. Japanese tourists arrive in busloads to pay homage at the site where, for eleven months in 1987 and 1988, Kieślowski filmed the series: a collection of gray, high-rise apartment blocks built in the 1970s in typical Soviet-era style with prefabricated slabs of steel-reinforced masonry. Despite the project’s open courtyards, shots of parking lots, concrete stairwells, and uniform balconies dominate The Decalogue, giving the impression of an architectural wasteland that appears, in Paul Coates’ words, “as forbidding as the Mosaic tablets.”1 Long intrigued by the Inflancka, Kieślowski tried to produce a short documentary about it in the 1970s, calling it “the most beautiful housing estate in Warsaw,” but adding, “It looks pretty awful, so you can imagine what the others are like.”2 Dreary and bleak throughout the series, the apartment scheme assembles in one place characters of different classes and occupations, from taxi drivers and postal workers to doctors, lawyers and professors, the wealthier of whom own their flats within a cooperative system. Despite disparities in income and education, all the residents are subject to deficiencies in heating and plumbing. Four decades later, the beautification and full privatization of these apartments would seem to reflect a new, more prosperous Poland, transformed from the privations of the Cold War, enriched by its membership in the European Union and NATO. But appearances are deceptive, and Kieślowski, who lamented Poland’s “unfortunate” geopolitical location, would be the first to note that certain conditions have not changed (KK, 142). With Vladmir Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022, Poland is once again threatened on its eastern border by a Russian military presence, while also maintaining a tense relationship on the west with Germany, an EU partner whom the Polish government has insisted owes more than a trillion dollars for carnage caused by the Second World War. Meanwhile, the right-wing Law and Justice party, which held a governing majority from 2015 until 2023, continues to deny Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust, encouraging the historical amnesia that Kieślowski critiques in Decalogue Eight and criminalizing claims of Polish complicity. Under President Andrzej Duda’s administration, the judiciary, which Kieślowski presents as a chilling extension of the state in Five, was threatened with changes that would, once again, rob it of much of its independence.3 A widely cited 2022 Global Happiness Study, conducted during 2019–2022, reported that Poles are among the least satisfied populations in Europe, on a level with Hungary but behind other former Soviet-Bloc countries such as the Czech Republic and Romania.4 Synthesizing respondents’ assessments of their personal freedom, financial wellbeing, social support, peace and security, the study’s results are consistent with Kieślowski’s portrait of a demoralized nation populated by gloomy ”individualists” who ”can’t really come to terms with other people” (KK, 123). Perhaps Poland has yet to cast off the legacy of distrust and disappointment the filmmaker regards as a deeply ingrained trait in a nation repeatedly betrayed by history: “There’s a general bitterness there which comes from the fact that hopes have been so frequently shattered” (KK, 123).
In Blind Chance, released in 1981, a disillusioned ex-political prisoner echoes Kieślowski’s description of a demoralized culture when he tells the protagonist, Witek, “We’re going through one of those times when you can see that everything’s falling apart. The people running things are helpless. These structures are bound to crack. It’s just a matter of time.” Six years later, the cracks had multiplied and expanded, but Kieślowski reports that he no longer believed “that politics could change the world, let alone for the better” (KK, 145). In making The Decalogue he had no interest in the seismic shifts of Poland’s governmental structure because, as he explains in his memoir, “During martial law, I realized that politics aren’t really important … they don’t … answer any of our essential, fundamental human and humanistic questions” (KK, 144). The questions that animate the series are both ethical and ontological: how should one live? and why should one live at all in an atomized civilization where “people come home, lock the door on the inside and remain alone with themselves”? (KK, 146). This pervasive retreat into domestic spaces helps to explain Kieślowski’s decision to write The Decalogue, “ten propositions, ten one-hour films,” for Polish television. Believing that “television means solitude,” he sought to enter Poland’s cloistered domains and present his characters’ stories “more slowly” through a household medium (143, 155, 154). Although he had initially intended to give the screenplays to ten young directors, upon completing them he quickly realized “I didn’t want to hand them over to anyone else” (144). Funding, however, soon became a problem when Kieślowski exhausted his budget from the state Television authority. Approaching the Ministry of Art and Culture, he proposed making longer, theatrical versions of two of the Decalogue scripts to finance the original project. These adaptations of Five and Six, A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love, were released a year before the series’ premiere on Polish television, the former winning the Jury Prize at the 1988 Cannes Festival.
The Decalogue occupies a pivotal place in Kieślowski’s career, coming between his Polish features of the 1970s and early 1980s and the French language films of the 1990s. It also stands as a hinge between the director’s male-dominated works and The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colors trilogy, which are devoted to female interiority. Noting his earlier focus on men, Kieślowski explained that he wanted to represent “a woman’s point of view” in several Decalogue episodes (KK, 174). Despite Slavoj Žižek’s contention that the series is “male-centered,” with women stereotypically reduced to “agents of hysterical outbursts,”5 the films bear out Kieślowski’s claim that they are distributed “equally” between men and women, with complex female protagonists or co-protagonists in the second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eight installments (KK, 174). More important, The Decalogue marks a decisive shift in Kieślowski’s intentions as a filmmaker, a turn toward the exploration of “what lies within” characters, driven by his conviction that “if you look closely enough … inside each [individual] there is something interesting.”6 In penetrating these “secrets and dramas” Kieślowski often presents a solitary person framed by one of “thousands of similar windows” in the apartment buildings (KK, 146). For the characters shown gazing out—including Dorota in Two, Anka in Four, Jacek in Six, and Roman in Nine—the windows denote both an isolated point of view and a vexed desire to get beyond it. Their efforts to escape cloistered consciousness are usually stillborn or self-destructive, but Kieślowski’s camera glides through the glass to investigate their private lives. In doing so, he fulfills the pledge he made in a 1981 manifesto that urged Polish directors to “replenish” cinematic language by turning in a new direction “that can be summed up in the formula: in depth rather than breadth, inwards rather than outward.”7 Ewa Badowska notes that this “profound artistic and ideological shift” toward subjectivity implicitly challenges the totalitarian system of People’s Poland in which “the private” had long been regarded as the corrupt domain of bourgeois individualism.8 While highly distinctive, The Decalogue’s characters struggle with moral and existential dilemmas that Kieślowski notes “could occur in every life,” allowing the audience to think: “I’ve been in that position. I know exactly how they feel.”9 He recalls that in planning the scripts with his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it “very quickly became clear that these would be films about feelings and passions, because we knew that love, or the fear of death, or the pain caused by a needle prick, are common to all people, irrespective of their political views, the colour of their skin or their standard of living” (Decalogue, xiii).
The integrative trope I propose in exploring these familiar “feelings and passions” in The Decalogue’s ten episodes is, paradoxically, that of disintegration. It’s a many-layered concept elemental in a series whose protagonists break one or more of the Commandments and inhabit what Jozef Tischer calls “a destroyed world … where every act is drained of meaning.”10 Heretofore, only Joseph Kickasola has touched upon the “heavy metaphorical quality” of this thematic, identifying “breakage” as a “liminal image” that often marks the rupture of “communal relationships” or personal loss.11 Kickasola’s work is the richest Kieślowski scholarship to date, but the fracturing motif is just one of a dozen he traces throughout the director’s entire oeuvre. My own focus is exclusively on The Decalogue where I argue that breakdown functions as a multidimensional principle—historical, moral, social, and psychological—that informs the series’ conception, organization, and style. Brokenness, in Kieślowski’s view, is Poland’s legacy and perhaps its destiny as a frequently invaded “place through which all new roads always pass,” a country that gets “thrashed” each time “we try to tear ourselves away from where we are” (KK, 141). He told Simon Hattenstone, “Poland has been through so much in the past, and it has ruined us,” and by the mid-1980s the entire country “had sunk into chaos and disorder; nothing and no one was spared” (Interviews, 151, Decalogue, xi). The most profound and distinguishing feature of this general collapse, for Kieślowski, was an erosion of the theological imperatives and ethical certainties codified in the Ten Commandments. Remembering his decision to undertake the project during a period of martial law that began in December 1981, he explained, “when everything is falling apart, it is worthwhile to turn to fundamental questions” (Interviews, 47). The Decalogue is filled with individuals who, in Kieślowski’s words, “don’t really know what’s right or wrong and are desperately looking” (KK, 79). In a 1988 interview with Polish journalist Bożena Janicka, he spoke of the difficulty of finding authoritative moral guidance even in the most devoutly Christian country in Europe: “[C]riteria are falling apart. It’s not certain what’s good and what’s bad, how we should live” (Interviews, 48). At a time when life had lost “clarity, focus,” Kieślowski “thought it worth making the Decalogue above all to confront those murky, fuzzy situations that make up our existence, with those simple unequivocal Commandments: don’t kill, don’t fornicate, don’t steal” (48). In exploring these ancient rules, Kieślowski tries to determine if they retain any significance and applicability in the contemporary world. He cautions that the series is not an “illustration” of the Commandments but rather a “reflection” on each, offering not an “exact definition” of moral conduct but a meditation on the challenges inherent in “concrete everyday decisions.” Trapped in ethical conundrums, his characters find that the “essence” of their decisions usually consists of choosing “the lesser evil,” even as they struggle to understand the precepts against which they are transgressing (KK, 146, 149).
Details
- Pages
- XII, 214
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034351195
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034351201
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783034351188
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22098
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (January)
- Keywords
- Film television Kieslowski Poland ethics God breakage
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XII, 214 pp., 10 b/w ill.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG