TY  - BOOK
AU  - Philip Sicker
PY  - 2025
CY  - New York, United States of America
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 1663-8972
SN  - 9783034351195
TI  - Kieslowski's Decalogue
T2  - Broken Commandments, Shattered Lives
DO  - 10.3726/b22098
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1471568
N2  - Written and produced under martial law in 1980’s Communist Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue presents a collective portrait of a demoralized nation populated by gloomy individualists" who respond to other people with antagonism or indifference. Feeling betrayed by a history of brutal invasions, the series’ characters struggle to cast off a legacy of a bitterness that has arisen because their national hopes have been so frequently shattered. Yet the central questions that animate The Decalogue are not political but ethical and ontological: How should one live? And why should one live at all in an atomized civilization? In exploring these questions in relation to the Ten Commandments, the series’ unifying principle is, paradoxically, disintegration: Kieślowski’s protagonists break the Commandments in a fractured world drained of meaning. Disintegration functions as a multidimensional principle—moral, historical, social, and psychological—informing The Decalogue’s conception, organization, and style. In analyzing these features the study draws on a wide range of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic inter-texts.
KW  - Film, television, Kieslowski, Poland, ethics, God, breakage
LA  - English
ER  -