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One of my friends had an iPhone. This was unusual at the time; iPhones had only been available in the UK for a little over 4 years, so by early 2012 hand-me-downs were still uncommon, let alone brand new devices. As we chatted, he showed me an iPhone app for creating custom “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. Does not appear (Barciś was meant to be a man at the railway station, but Kieślowski experienced technical difficulties preventing the character's inclusion in this episode) [13] [14] The Village Voice ranked The Decalogue at No. 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. [23] In January 2002, the film was listed among the Top 100 "Essential Films" of all time by the National Society of Film Critics. [24] The film ranked #36 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. [25] The way this effort to map limits builds upon film’s normal preoccupation with the parameters of a shot or scene becomes apparent in Dekalog: Eight’s class discussion of the complex anecdote underlying Dekalog: Two—Dorota, previously unable to conceive and fearing the consequences of her pregnancy’s testimony to an affair, feels she can bring it to term only if her husband dies of the cancer afflicting him, and therefore importunes his doctor to tell her whether this will happen—and a story of a child’s wartime abandonment. Ethics professor Zofia concludes the class discussion by stating, “We’ve taken this far enough.” Is this simply because the class has run out of time—it breaks up a moment later—or has the issue genuinely run its course? The question becomes pointed when Zofia later mentions the need to think things through to the end—as if they may not arrive there of their own accord.
In the 2002 Sight & Sound poll to determine the greatest films of all time, Dekalog and A Short Film About Killing received votes from 4 critics and 3 directors, including Ebert, New Yorker critic David Denby, and director Mira Nair. [20] Additionally, in the Sight & Sound poll held the same year to determine the top 10 films of the previous 25 years, Kieslowski was named #2 on the list of Top Directors, with votes for his films being split between Dekalog, Three Colors Red/Blue, and The Double Life of Veronique. [21] It’s one thing to watch “For All Mankind” and recognize our place in a vast and indifferent universe, but quite another to see things on a granular level and grapple with the egocentricity of human existence, to dig into the narrow reality of our lives and appreciate how — for all of our laws and guidelines — we’re ultimately a planet of unsupervised children. This questioning of faith is explicitly dealt with in the film’s narrative. Both the mise en scène and dialogue of The Decalogue 1 feature more direct links with religion than other entries in the Biblically-structured Dekalog. Two of the film’s key scenes take place either in front of or within a church that features a large cross in its walls: the Church of the Ascension of the Lord. Moreover, while Kieślowski and Piesiewicz primarily sought to use contemporary stories to highlight the commandments’ continuing relevance – leaving philosophical and theological discussions to the side to show their relevance to real moral decision-making (prompting Ebert to suggest that the characters do not even discuss the commandments or ethical views) – The Decalogue 1 actually includes several discussions explicitly contrasting empirical and spiritual approaches to life. After Pawel sees a dead dog in front of the aforementioned church, he asks his father about the nature of death. Krzysztof responds with an answer that is medical in nature. Pawel continues: “I mean, what is death?”, to which he receives another medical response. When he asks about the existence of the soul, he is told that the only things that survive us are achievements and memories. By contrast, when Pawel’s aunt Irena (Maja Komorowska) shows him a picture and Pawel asks, “Do you think he knows the meaning of life?”, his aunt responds positively as the camera shows us that it is a picture of Pope John-Paul II. This contrast of views is made explicitly during a phone call. After Krzysztof agrees to let Pawel attend religious classes, Irina asks if Krzysztof will take him the following day. Krzysztof sighs and looks ahead. The film then cuts to a medium shot of the computer, which distracts Krzysztof and leads him to end the conversation. In an unexplained occurrence echoing Krzysztof’s earlier lecture suggesting a properly programmed computer could have a personality, it reads, “I am ready”. Although the current round pens carry a similar refill and write just as well, I’m still a little sentimental for the hexagonal pens. I alternated between fountain pens and these MUJI pens for most of the mathematics I wrote at university: their narrower line width was useful for drawing out intricate symbols next to prose.
Voted for
Individual documentaries may indeed be scripted and structured to prove a point, but the form has an a priori openness to the unexpected, the uncontrolled, even the unreadable. Reality can transfix, however uncertain its meaning—or precisely because uncertainty nags like a riddle one feels it might be possible to solve. If the young man is the series’ most complete embodiment of the element of opacity in reality, its resistance to interpretation, Dekalog: Four, with its uncertainty over just what Anka may or may not have done with the letter around which it revolves, may be its fullest enactment. Kieślowski’s account of the young man’s genesis has the studio’s literary director, Witek Zalewski, worrying that the initial scripts were missing something—an absence remedied, paradoxically, by rendering it palpable, through this figure. He is the placeholder for an unknown, the reality to which fiction can respond by depositing speculation around it, as the sand grain provokes the oyster to deposit the pearl that obscures it. The result can be a form of the ambiguity prized by the great French film theorist and critic André Bazin, for whom photography disclosed “the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know” and was “an hallucination that is also a fact.” Is the young man mourning Paweł at the series’ start, or simply brushing smoke from his eyes? His direct look at the camera, like that of an enigmatically silent documentary interviewee, drives a wedge into our own, spectatorial world, opening it up to realities visible, at most, through a glass darkly. I reach the Latvian Embassy first and immediately deviate from the route I planned (it would’ve been number 3). The idea and the route for this run emerged months ago. I put it off: I knew that jogging to every EU embassy in London would be close to a half marathon. 27 stops, with navigation between them, was going to take its toll too. The way A Short Film About Love moves from realism to metaphysics may be emblematic of the shape of Kieślowski’s career. Graduating from Poland’s famous Łódź film school amid the turmoil of the late 1960s—which saw student protests and a government anti-Semitic campaign, then working-class protests over rising prices that culminated in the unseating of Party First Secretary Władysław Gomułka—Kieślowski, throughout the subsequent decade, would often define his project as one of describing the world. Along with various other artists associated with the seventies Young Culture movement, he argued that Polish reality required description before it could be changed. Observational (“fly-on-the-wall”) and interactive (“talking-head”) documentary filmmaking, which had come to the fore in the sixties, were particularly well suited to this task, and Kieślowski’s documentaries would all fall into one or the other of these categories; indeed, he would even, in 1980, call one of his most haunting films Talking Heads (he liked self-deprecating but accurate titles: cf. A Short Film About Killing). His later move away from documentary is often attributed to his growing fear of harming his subjects through their candid self-revelations, some of which he provoked. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he would resist television transmission of the documentary From a Night Porter’s Point of View (1977),whose interviewed subject voices his support for public hangings. Kieślowski’s quarrel, continued by fictional means in Dekalog: Five, was less with the protagonist than with the punitive worldview the porter exemplified. But if the move toward fiction seemed to end the project of description, an overlooked statement in Kieślowski on Kieślowski casts it rather as that project’s logical next step: “Only when you describe something can you start speculating about it.” This is most obviously the case in Blind Chance (1981), made as his move to fiction was consummated, though shelved at the time by the authorities, where one contemporary character’s experience of three contrasting political and apolitical lives prompts the question (critics posed it again and again) whether any is the “true” one. Fiction is the speculation that follows from description, its question being, What is it that lies within?
Dekalog: One," the initial piece of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s monumental series "Dekalog," opens the curtain to a world where morality and human choices intertwine in a dance of poignant revelations and inevitable consequences. Set in Poland, it paves the way to explore intricate human relationships and ethical choices, making it a must-watch for aficionados of Eastern European cinema. Director's Vision
Dekalog: One" is a brilliant symphony of visual narrative and philosophical exploration, a cornerstone in the world of film, significant for its delicate portrayal of complex human themes. It is a radiant gem in Kieślowski's oeuvre, offering a rich and intricate exploration of the human soul, making it an essential experience for those who seek the profound and the sublime in cinema. The fact that Piketty is French doesn’t particularly matter to most articles that introduce him this way: granted some of his work focused on the French economy and most of his books and articles were published in French before English translations, but this rarely affects the context. In the hands of a weaker director and writer — Krzysztof Piesiewicz co-wrote the series — each commandment may have been taken more literally. My naïve expectation when I first approached the series was that it each episode’s commandment would be obvious. I couldn’t name all ten commandments before watching the series, and the dilemmas of each film often overlapped several commandments. Importantly neither writer imposed their own views onto the characters: the audience is left free to judge the characters, their actions, and their decisions themselves. What might we do in the same situation? Would we ever get into that situation? How would we resolve it?
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