Kieslowski's Ten Commandments

One film was never enough for Krzysztof Kieslowski to say what he had to say. The Polish director's "tri-color trilogy" films, Blue, White, and Red (1993), each took a color of the French flag for both title and unifying design motif, along with one of three classic Revolotionary ideals, "Liberty," "Fraternity," and "Equality" for theme. Kieslowski was working on a new trilogy, the themes featured in this case to be "Heaven", "Purgatory", and "Hell" at the time of his death at age 54 in 1996. The multi-film work which Kieslowski will be most remembered is his 1988 masterpiece, The Decalogue, ten films, each featuring a Commandment from the famous Ten.

Kieslowski was no Cecil B. DeMille. He was neither a showman, preferring the subtle to the spectacular, nor was he interested in filming Bible stories — though it is true that director DeMille's 1925 silent version of the story most associated with his name did feature a sequence in which moderns grappled with those ancient Thou Shalt Nots. Kieslowski's Ten Commandments, on the other hand, concerns itself fully with the here and now of ethical dillemas. His ten one-hour films of The Decalogue each feature vastly different stories of people living in same apartment complex in 1980s Warsaw. The specific social and political context is mostly irrelevant: for the ethical challenges human beings confront in those stone tablets are of timeless significance.

The setting of Kieslowski's films is, of course, classic Communist cement block architecture, but the lives of the people depicted therein are far from plain, assembly-line objects, either in their personal histories, or in their treatment by the director. These are ethical dillemas made flesh and blood, Ten Commandments turned into seven or more deadly sins by circumstances which suddenly plunge ordinary people into the gaping jaws of moral choice. The university professor whose faith is in science must answer questions from his child about death. A man who finds himself chasing around Warsaw with a former mistress on Christmas Eve. The dead mother, the daughter and the sealed letter — and the secrets it may or may not contain. The child from the past who fills the present with issues that cannot be escaped. Major figures from one episode are likely to make cameo appearances in others, adding to the already sobering sense of the reality of their lives and problems, and also wakening us to the possibility of similarly complicated and significant stories going on outside of the one we pay the most attention to: our own.

Walker Percy, in his Message In A Bottle, talks the human propensity for sucking the meaning out of symbols, then running on empty: blithely visiting the Grand Canyon and complaining that it's not as good as the postcard pictures of it we've all seen. The sightseer, says Percy, has lost the Grand Canyon — he looks at it, but doesn't see it. The only pleasure left is to see how close the real thing conforms to his preconceived notions. According to Percy, there are ways for the sightseer to recover the Grand Canyon. Among these are 1) leaving the beaten path, 2) finding a level above the beaten path, and 3) "as a conseqence of a breakdown of the symbolic machinery by which the experts present the experience to the consumer."

Kieslowski always takes the path less beaten, and the result is a breathtaking recovery of The Law in all its thunder-on-Sinai terror. This is a very different experience than Charleton Heston's over-modulated dialogue and swirling animated lightening bolts. These are ten films about SIN, a different sin in each film, sin all its attractiveness and inevitable tragic consequence. It would be a mistake, however, to sit down to one of these films with the goal of making simple one-to-one connections between the story and the commandment it takes as its theme. Kieslowski doesn't allow that. Stephen Holden of the The New York Times, who recently named the films to his own "best of the year" list, writes that the films of The Decalogue "are elliptical stories that draw no easy moral conclusions." Even at the end of a screeing of one of the films, the breathless viewer may still be a little unclear as to how it connects to the commandment by which it was titled. With a little luck, however, Kieslowski will have thrown off the viewer's balance to the point that in his grappling to understand, he will at last confront not just connections between a work of art and the Moral Law, but also between the Moral Law and himself.

One of the obvious reasons these films can not reduce to simple morality plays is that Kieslowski is an artist, not a didact. He tells a story in an artful way, which means sometimes the long way 'round, holding back on conclusions he relies on a smart audience to make for themselves. He also is a master of composition and color — after all, this is the man who titled three movies after colors and used each hue as design motif. Yet even though these are stories first, and artfully told, the stories embody meanings that work on the viewer during and after the screening. You may find yourself arguing about the questions the films raise long after you've forgotten the facts of the individual stories.

While continually treating philosophical and religious ideas in his films, Kieslowski's own beliefs never reduced to allegience to any recognizable tradition of faith. He was a seeker, for sure; whether he ever found anything doesn't seem apparent from anything he has left us in the way of art or his words. In The Decalogue particularly, Kieslowski withholds imposing any specific theological or ideological construct on his stories, but nevertheless, there is implied a most sincere — even reverent — acknowledgement of moral realities, along with a sense of necessity for making moral choices, and the urgency of making the right one — since wrong choices in the moral arena have the farthest reaching consequences.

Kieslowski's screenwriter and collaborator on The Decalogue (as well as the "Tri-Color" and "Heaven-Hell-Purgatory" trilogies) was a criminal lawyer named Krzysztof Piesiewicz (pee-ess-ko-vich) who has both continued writing films despite the death of Kieslowski, and also gone on to become a member of the Polish Senate. Piesiewicz met Kieslowski in 1982 when the latter was working on a documentary about political trials in the wake of hardliner General Jaruzelski's Communist supernova. Piesiewicz, who provided technical advise about Polish law to the director, suggested to Kieslowski the idea that somebody should make a film about the Ten Commandments. Poland, even under Communism, was a very Catholic country, and Kieslowski became interested in exploring the moral law we know by heart but find impossible to obey. Piesiewicz describes himself as less Catholic than simply Christian. Whether this identification involves a general allegience to a moral tradition or a more personal commitment is hard to discern from any statements of Piesiewicz that have found their way into the Western press. Despite his responsibilities in the Polish government, Piesiewicz continues to churn out screenplays for other directors, and has yet to shake off that habit acquired from the years with Kieslowski, of scripting multi-film works.

Meanwhile, the screenplays co-written by Piesiewicz and Kieslowski for their projected new trilogy may also eventually be turned to into films. Indeed, German director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) is just completing "Heaven", budgeted at at $11-million and starring Cate Blanchett.

The Decalogue was aired on Polish television in 1988-'89. The series has had considerable arthouse screenings in the past decade, but it's only made it to video/VHS release in the past year (distributed by Facets Multimedia). Honors the film has been recognized with include the FIPRESCI Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, Best Foreign Television Program by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 1997 Best Foreign Language Film by the Chicago Film Critics Association. In 1995, the films were named to the Vatican's list of important films. This year, Entertainment Weekly hailed The Decalogue as the year's best video release.

High praise for a series of films which feature sin without glamorizing it. Instead, we get unflinching examination of betrayals, murder, suicide, greed, lust. The Decalogue is not an easy series of films to watch, certainly it can be exhausting to watch them all in a row. Images pass before our eyes of lonely, frightened people, grasping after significance and safety, hurting one another, suffering the consequences — the view, in some small way perhaps, of the God above Sinai who sought to mitigate the pain of human tragedy by carving a relatively small list of Thou Shalt Nots into stone.