Film: Dekalog
Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Country: Poland
Released: December 1989
Runtime: 572 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: Tor / SFB / TVP
Influenced: Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, Michael Haneke, David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky
Watching Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog for the first time as part of my research for this blog was a complete revelation. It's the closest that cinema has ever come for me to the profound experience of reading Dostoevsky. Each of the ten short, hour-long films is a complex moral story that delves deep into questions of right and wrong. There is little or no politics in Dekalog, but instead Kieślowski invests each chapter with a strong sense of the oppressive bureaucracy of Communist and Catholic Poland at that time, as well as the alienating urban environment of Warsaw. Instead of politics, the focus is on morality. Kieślowski has said that, although he made the episodes for TV, he conceived each of them as films (two of them, chapters V and VI, were later expanded into feature films).
Kieślowski co-wrote Dekalog with his lawyer friend Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who was the brains behind the idea of basing each of the 10 films on the Ten Commandments. In order from one to ten, the films address various broad themes including religion vs science (I), euthanasia (II), adultery (III), authority (IV), justice (V), the nature of love (VI), ownership (VII), truth (VIII), jealousy (IX) and greed (X). My personal favourites out of the ten films are I, V and VI and in these the plot could be summarised as people who don’t know how to love (VI), people whose love has been ripped away from them (V) and people who love abstract things – in this case, rationality – too much (I). All ten of the stories are interconnected, and some characters appear in more than one story, including a nameless, Christ-like character played by Polish actor Artur Barciś. All the films are shot in black & white and have a slow, deliberate pace.
Kieślowski and Piesiewicz began their collaboration on Dekalog after realising that they shared a fascination with moral issues and ethical choices. Each film in the series is a self-contained story and while they share thematic connections, they are not directly related in terms of plotlines. For example, in episode II, we see a doctor's difficult dilemma over how to balance the life of his patient with the demands of the patient's pregnant wife, while in episode VI, the story focuses on a young man who secretly intercepts and reads the love letters of his neighbour, leading to profound emotional consequences. While the ten films share the same framework, environmental setting and concern with ethical issues, there are differences between them too, most notably the unique, poetic visual style of episode V.
Dekalog was a critical and commercial success, winning numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It remains a popular choice for study in film schools and universities, owing to its innovative approach to storytelling and its philosophical depth. Kieślowski's in-depth exploration of complex moral dilemmas in ordinary people's lives was groundbreaking for cinema at the time. The Dekalog series also experimented with visual and narrative techniques, including the use of symbolism, recurring motifs and interconnected storylines. Kieślowski's success as a masterful director and storyteller would paved the way for his later acclaimed works, including The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colours Trilogy (1993-94).
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