06.10. Dekalog 5
03.11. Dekalog 6
01.12. Dekalog 10
For film critics, the ten-part «Dekalog» is regarded as a masterpiece by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, who later became known to a broad international audience through, among other things, the Three Colours trilogy. The stories of love, death, faith, suffering and joy are all set around a grim Warsaw apartment block. Directed by chance, when residents become closer acquainted or commit acts of violence.
While the Catholic Church interpreted the Dekalog cycle as the backbone of the morality it teaches, Kieślowski said about his films: «When I hear the word morality, I have to leave the room». The Dekalog is therefore not a film underpinned by the Ten Commandments – God is dead, socialism, too – but shows profoundly individual dilemmas in which people are searching for a certain degree of accountability for their own actions.
The content of the films, however, must not detract from Kieślowski’s masterly, minimalist nature of film-making. The close-ups emphasise the mysterious, while the cut, which does not necessarily follow the logical sequence of the plot construction, underlines the amount of fate that actually influences the lives of the individual characters. Using contrasts of light and dark, Kieślowski manages to paint cinematic portraits that are unlike any other.
Krzysztof Kieślowski, PL 1988/1989, 10 Parts.
