Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Photography: Piotr Sobocinski, Witold Adamek, Jacek Blawut, Slawomir Idziak, Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz, Edward Klosinski, Dariusz Kuc, Krzysztof Pakulski, Wieslaw Zdort
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Editor: Ewa Smal
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary
Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.
I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary
Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.
I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.
The best two episodes may be the fifth (“Thou shalt not kill”) and the sixth (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”). Kieslowski or someone funding him liked them well enough to let him expand them by 20 or 30 minutes each into the commercial movie releases A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, respectively. They were actually released in 1988, before Dekalog aired, and then disappeared for some time. They are absolutely worth running down and are included with the current Criterion package as well as the 10 original episodes. Killing has a somewhat obvious message about capital punishment, but the murdering antihero up for it is one of the more memorable miscreants ever committed to film, and the dilemmas are vivid. It challenges and finds accord with the whole idea of the 5th Commandment on various levels. Love tells a complicated and unsettling story about a lonely young man stalking an older woman in the apartment complex and the strange chemistry that develops between them.
“Do you believe in God?” is a question that comes up in many of these episodes. Wikipedia points out that milk is featured in seven episodes. Artur Barcis, first-named in the cast list above, appears in eight episodes, always a minor sidelong character with a staring face—a witness. He was supposed to appear in at least one more episode but apparently the shot was botched somehow. These are the crumbs of clues up for discussion in parsing this long picture out.
Better to stay close to the primary story in each. You don’t need the connective tissue really. Take the eighth episode, for example (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”), whose summary may suggest how these stories go by writers Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Elzbieta (Teresa Marczewska), a Polish-American journalist researching the Holocaust, has traveled to Warsaw to audit a class taught by Zofia (Maria Koscialkowska), an ethics professor who uses case studies and a Socratic style. It emerges that, during World War II, Zofia sheltered and helped victims of the Nazi regime—and that, at one point, she had refused to aid Elzbieta, then 6 years old. Zofia had good reason for refusing to help her, but she has been haunted by the memory ever since, assuming the girl perished. But she didn’t, and now she is an American journalist confronting her. I’m not sure, exactly, what it has to do with false witness, but I think some thinking about it, talking about it with others, perhaps even revisiting it, might reveal more.
That’s how they all work. I noticed just now that IMDb users ranked the eighth episode second-lowest, at 7.5. Only the third (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”) is ranked lower, at 7.4, and I liked that one quite a bit too, set on Christmas Eve. By contrast, the highest-ranked is the sixth (8.6). Tied at 8.5 are the fifth and the first (“I am the Lord thy God... thou shalt not have other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them”) (notice where the Old Testament God winds up and has a lot to say). High marks, even at the low end! The only one I disagree with is the 10th (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods”), which the users gave an 8.3 and I would probably rank more like 6. It attempts to finish the thing on a comical note, which I thought didn’t work. But the rest is so good—I think it’s fair to call Dekalog essential.
“Do you believe in God?” is a question that comes up in many of these episodes. Wikipedia points out that milk is featured in seven episodes. Artur Barcis, first-named in the cast list above, appears in eight episodes, always a minor sidelong character with a staring face—a witness. He was supposed to appear in at least one more episode but apparently the shot was botched somehow. These are the crumbs of clues up for discussion in parsing this long picture out.
Better to stay close to the primary story in each. You don’t need the connective tissue really. Take the eighth episode, for example (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”), whose summary may suggest how these stories go by writers Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Elzbieta (Teresa Marczewska), a Polish-American journalist researching the Holocaust, has traveled to Warsaw to audit a class taught by Zofia (Maria Koscialkowska), an ethics professor who uses case studies and a Socratic style. It emerges that, during World War II, Zofia sheltered and helped victims of the Nazi regime—and that, at one point, she had refused to aid Elzbieta, then 6 years old. Zofia had good reason for refusing to help her, but she has been haunted by the memory ever since, assuming the girl perished. But she didn’t, and now she is an American journalist confronting her. I’m not sure, exactly, what it has to do with false witness, but I think some thinking about it, talking about it with others, perhaps even revisiting it, might reveal more.
That’s how they all work. I noticed just now that IMDb users ranked the eighth episode second-lowest, at 7.5. Only the third (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”) is ranked lower, at 7.4, and I liked that one quite a bit too, set on Christmas Eve. By contrast, the highest-ranked is the sixth (8.6). Tied at 8.5 are the fifth and the first (“I am the Lord thy God... thou shalt not have other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them”) (notice where the Old Testament God winds up and has a lot to say). High marks, even at the low end! The only one I disagree with is the 10th (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods”), which the users gave an 8.3 and I would probably rank more like 6. It attempts to finish the thing on a comical note, which I thought didn’t work. But the rest is so good—I think it’s fair to call Dekalog essential.
No comments:
Post a Comment