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A Guide to 'The Decalogue' by Kieslowski

Before the Ink Dries; or, Notes Towards the River Novel

The Decalogue (1989)


Director Kryzyztof Kieslowski smoking
Kryzyztof Kieslowski

Something in the boy miscomputes, “A mass for her soul?” Pawel asks his father, Krzysztof, leafing through the obituaries in the first episode of The Decalogue. “It’s a way of saying goodbye,” his Dad assures him. Something in the father misunderstands. He has raised the boy as any mathematician would, under the covenant of the assured. The kid wins chess games, carries out his education with a shrug, even writes advanced code on their new computer. But the power of math frequently collides with the dove-span of his young imagination and, in secret, he uses the computer to try and measure ghosts. Something in his father misunderstands. “A mass for her soul?” What Pawel means is, What is the mass of a soul? How do we measure that? How heavy is it? What does it feel like? Is it hot like a heart? Or cold and bumpy like a star? “There’s no soul,” his Dad assures him. Then where do I plant it? How does it burn? Is it titanium, or fur? A tarantula, a nuke? Brittle, alert? Is it full of lights?


Kryzyztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue is, essentially, an adaptation of ‘The Ten Commandments’. Each of its ten episodes follows another resident in a Warsaw apartment complex with little overlap and each of its ten episodes is themed around another of the biblical laws, though its didactics (you might be pleased to hear) are intentionally foggy. If one thing can be said of Kieslowski’s work it is that it is a city of fog. Julie Delpy, who starred in his Three Colours trilogy, fondly remembers how he sat cross-legged beneath the camera, as close to the actors as possible, looking up through his huge square-framed glasses whilst chain-smoking the Polish cigarettes that probably killed him. The cigarette smoke inevitably swam up into the lens. The Decalogue can only be seen, literally, through a glass darkly. 


As Pawel and his dad measure everything, from the temperature to time, to love and the soul, Pawel’s question becomes a cypher for the films at large. Each is wizened by qualia (melting, reflections, red brake lights, green screens) and coincidence told in rhymes (fur coat – cut – dead dog) and many of them ask its characters to make prophecies of some sort. Each character is utmost concerned with cupping the ephemeral, striving for its moment of concrescence – epiphany – whilst still hoping against hope that plenty of mystery will remain. Stop me when I describe faith… Yet, despite its flight of ghosts, Kieslowski is certain that “the films are not about freedom”. His characters seek the opposite, to choose weight over lightness, to find security via absolutes, and most do so in vain. To weigh a soul is to weigh thaw. This is only further frustrated by simple alchemy: ephemera is also the by-product of their struggle, fears and premonitions the steam of its sweat.






The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski
The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski

To be sure, the folly of certainty is spiritual death like a breath in the cold night with no cloud though I’m unsure it stands as successful refutation of a soul, much rather evidence of its consequence. We are full of such category errors, changeling gerunds educated on nouns. Tomek’s own endeavours in ‘Dekalog VI’, A Short Film About Love, could even be framed as perverse if perversion is about following the recipe wrong, the proximity to romance’s burn notices: let me nearer to where we once grazed palms, the droplets from your hair on my lips once you wash, the smell of your breath, your bedroom. Without you, the us in me. I, necromancer. The pornographic exists in a separate sphere to that of sex; the consummate is only ever violent towards dreams. The feature-length A Short Film About Killing is the centrepiece, ‘Dekalog V’ is shot through choked iodine, in halves of wholes, castrato, through vignettes and dark partitions. Through his early abandoning of documentary for fiction because the “human object seems to disappear before the camera” Kieslowski guilelessly betrayed a hidden epistemology. He shares in his characters' faith. His cinema is the scales on which he weighs transience, chunk-by-chunk, death by a thousand cuts. And yet, The Decalogue stands as a dumbstruck wonder in aria. As a chorus. Its grand, humanist valency engenders a possible deliverance beyond the episode, beyond the frame; nowhere is this more explicitly invoked than in ‘Dekalog V’ when Piotr, the Hobbes-ian attorney, exasperatingly leans his forehead against the camera lens: Who watches over us?


Poland’s architecture, Warsaw, Krakow, wears its history on its sleeves: at a pigeon’s coo cities unfurl along a mysterious spatio-temporal gradient, Jewish Quarters with star-studded domes ripen against long, non-hyphenate Brutalism, which in turn stands towards grand market plazas and azure, orthodox spires. Citypasts nest within Pastcities. Funded, filmed and partially released in 1987-1988 during the final years of Soviet Martial law, and released in entirety on Polish television in 1989 - the same year that the country became a democracy - Kieslowski was supposedly criticised by both filmmakers and radicals for the distinctly apolitical nature of The Decalogue. Nevertheless, the "temperature" of Poland’s martial law is present in the building, in the broken lift (the rickety, intimate spinal column of the piece) and cold-running taps. All of the residents will - or will have - experienced the tragedy of the opening episode and all exist in the umbra of Warsaw's recent past. Everything is “post-”, especially the present & the present & the present… and the films' oneiric air is also that of the post-saged, the re-dreamed, of time marching craters in the earth and man as the rains that fill them. “I have a God that is suitable for me”, says the dream-journaling physician of ‘Dekalog II’. Best make it a pliant and lunar one that can bend to the day. 'Dekalog III' is particularly hazy, at Christmas Eve on the cusp of returns. It is difficult to tell if the adulterous couple are even adulterous, waiting for something to happen or reflecting on its happening and then, ultimately, who is alive and who is dead. Paradoxes abound; The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come indeed. Kieslowski refused to call The Decalogue a series, opting instead for “cycle”, defying causality in favour of new architecture fitted with wide-open, rushing ablutions.






The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski
The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski

Entry points or exit wounds – you choose: Lynch left glimmering tears in the ozone between television and cinema. The twenty-five-year foray into “premium TV” whimpered into a budgetary arms race, but the 2010s saw an increase in auteur access of hallowed ground previously reserved for 6-camera-coverage and writer’s rooms. Lynch’s lauded Twin Peaks The Return finds a post-plot wasteland nostalgic for its own electroconvulsions. Atlanta concluded not by tying up its loose ends, but by unfurling a sunken city that can never close and thus never die. Fielder’s The Curse saw its Beckettian insufferables stranded without direction (or judgement), and upon delivery of Too Old to Die Young, Refn told his viewers to start anywhere, finish anywhere, and flick through his episodes like they were tabs on a YouTube binge. He then promptly pronounced cinema dead. I wouldn’t go that far, but all lanes – Reels, YouTube, Streaming, TV, Cinema, Cinematic Universes – have merged into a mega highway, as the horse-drawn sidles up alongside hovercrafts.


Attempting to define (outside of commercial strategies) the fundamentals of “the series”, Ken Wascom proposes we take up the Roman-fleuve, the river novel, a term coined by French author Romain Rolland in 1909 for his ten-volume work. The river-novel, Wascom identifies, is a broader temporal ecology that “allows for variations”; it can “change courses, flood, branch-out or dry-up”. It can jump between estuaries or dreamwalk its desert bed; sub-plots can swell to preclude the protagonists, and those protagonists can call it quits, grow old, and die: most excitingly, the “river-novel allows the author to confront and critique the reader’s expectations and, moreover, what they imagine to be true.” Though I abhor its childish, self-cannibalising cloying for a major crossover event, Marvel’s “multiverse” is a quantum-savvy descriptor of this protean putty that honours both our relative experience of time and the writing process itself which, in my experience, is never linear, much less always continuous or strictly atomised. Floods and droughts, intrusions, intrusions ⁂


In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos’ recycling of a troupe of actors, themes and character names alongside subconscious lacerations permit a kind of slippage beyond its four dimensions. “Is this story before, after, across, above, under, or within the story preceding it?” In my own practice it has become most useful to think of structure geometrically, topographically, taking inspiration from the most vanguard mode of contemporary modes of storytelling, the videogame. I plan simple glyphs to invoke a piece’s libidinal charge, however bright or – as is often the case in The Decalogue – dulled. For example, I was inspired by Disco Elysium to write a short story that features a large cast, each with deadened acoustics, yet hopefully engendering the vividness of an ensemble. A longer work's two interlocking pieces are structured as a 𖦹 and a △ (spirals & triangles, a tango as old as time). And I have the most childish idea of an indecipherable book (whose shape is a nuclei or eye or found gem) in which each copy is stapled with a different card from a tarot deck. The page before the card reads, “At night he takes my fortune beneath the clamorous blue”, and the page after, “‘Aha’, he says, ‘So it will come to be’”. Completely naïve, but in many ways The Decalogue is like this, obtusely semiotic – almost arcane – vaguely uniform and infinitely ethical, with a grander ruleset inferred and unseen.


There are nine different cinematographers across the ten episodes, but almost all of the camera work shares a focus so shallow it renders the background non-descript – both a labyrinthine confinement, and an unfathomable expanse. Whichever way the coin lands, the apartment block can only be coloured by the people who live in it, its hallways only mapped by their ambulation, its sunsets only verified by their watching. Consequently, in the odd and striking moments when the camera does look at them from afar, the entire human drama plays out in an absurd theatre of intensely intimate gifts. So these are their stories: there is that man waiting ON a roundabout at 2 a.m., there is that woman who chased after your bus. You didn’t stop the driver. Mike Leigh says "I've only got to walk down the street. If I pass ten people there are ten possible films there." Here are four. After work I saw a man with a mohawk staring up at the snow falling down in the dark, he wore shorts and a t shirt and held six dead pheasants in his hands. I work in a bookshop. An English teacher bought a philosophy book, he went to school with the author, out of that same class their also came a Marxist, a dropout and a born-again Christian, he watched all of their lives play out in letters and half of the cricket team was dead. Another man waited impatiently for his wife, he rolled his eyes and said "They'll write on my gravestone, He spent his entire life in bookshops waiting for her." I heard a girl ask her mother, "Is every book about every-thing? I mean, is there anything that a book hasn't written?" Earlier that week a travelling zoo came to her school, she had to hold a tarantula, that night she could still feel its weight in her palms, about 50-60 grams, weirdly cold but definitely alive, like a handful of magnetised pins.






The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski
The Decalogue (1989), Kryzyztof Kieslowski

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