Meadow above Forest above Sea Rock

...Man was created in order to choose...

...But there is an accident, the ice cracks, and we watch with dread as the father searches futilely for his son, and then observes helplessly as a rescue team lifts a small, lifeless body from a black hole...

...If so, perhaps we can leave God out of it...

...One of the great achievements in cinema of the last generation, The Decalogue combines tough-minded realism and hallucinatory style...

...You simply have to remove the mask, then we can remain together for a while...

...The episode sets the tone for the series by dramatizing the conflict between the rational and the spiritual...

...As Kieslowski pointed out, "Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory...

...During the class, students are asked to bring up ethical cases, and one of them raises the issue dramatized in Decalogue 2. When Zofia comments that the important thing is that "the child is alive," Elzbeita is prompted to bring up another case, "which has the advantage of being true...

...It would be wrong to think of The Decalogue as a personal achievement by Kieslowski alone...

...And how they vanished, smooth as spirits, before you could notice...

...Ironically, Kieslowski added, some of his actors who were Catholic "didn't want to perform in a given film if I didn't tell them what commandment it was dealing with...

...The story introduces Dorota, a married woman pregnant by a man not her hus-band, who asks a doctor to tell her whether her desperately ill spouse will live or die...

...Obviously, Kieslowski is not encouraging us to respond to the Decalogue in a mechanical way...

...Dorota has her child, and her fears prove groundless: We see the husband delightedly embracing the baby at the end...

...the plaintive music of Dixie Partridge Meadow above Forest above Sea Rock The breeze soundless, and the tides...breakers abridged into creases, unwrinkling...

...she simply takes him in her arms...

...We learn later what had left him so emotionally empty: His wife and children had been suddenly killed ten years earlier when a bomb obliterated their home while he was at work...

...As Georgia Brown wrote in 1989 in the Village Voice: "Faces are crucial...

...he shows characters and actions that are at first opaque, and only gradually take on significance...

...to the director, if the numbers of some episodes were reversed-for example 6 and 9-it would make no difference...

...there is a shyness that coexists with an obsessive romanticism, which is heightened when one night he observes her weeping...

...its characters are imperfect but never totally unsympathetic...

...The death of the boy Pavel in 1, and the decision for life in 2, only reinforce the power of Decalogue 8, which for me is the high point of the series...

...The woman genuinely cares about both her husband and her lover, and believes-even though she herself would like to have the child-that, if her husband is going to live, she must have an abortion...

...By not giving real titles to the separate films, Kieslowski said he established a sort of game with the viewers...

...an older writer happened to be present...

...Stanley Kubrick, who wrote the introduction to the edition of the screenplays of The Decalogue, emphasizes the importance of fate for Kieslowski...

...The episode brings together two women: Zofia, an aging ethics professor, and Elzbeita, a younger woman, an American Jew, who has translated some of the professor's work...

...The cinematographic use of filters makes everything seem soiled and opaque...

...The latter was then trying to make a documentary about political trials that took place after General Wojciech Jaruzelski took power...

...In other words, in the interior of each person you can find something interesting...

...The Decalogue is one of the ethical foundations of today's society...

...To have all the stories take place in the same neighborhood also had the advantage of always presenting closed spaces...

...A considerable share of credit should go to Krzysztof Piesiewicz...

...Zbigniew Preisner-who worked regularly with the director-is used with great restraint...

...The apartment complex is an ideal set for Kieslowski because his camera is fond of windows, mirrors, reflections of any kind: Look through any window [of the housing project], there are people behind them...

...But yes," the old writer insisted, without convincing us...

...Rather, we wished to say, 'We know no more than you...

...None of the rest of us had seen this man...

...A week later, the writer died...

...As always, esthetic, social, and moral concerns work together to concentrate and deepen Kieslowski's films...

...Elzbeita recognizes the professor's moral courage...

...The latter is invited to sit in on Zofia's seminar at the university...

...The wax leaves a tear on the large image of the Virgin that dominates the scene...

...Kieslowski's Decalogue strengthens my conviction that religious art in our time must inevitably be a very indirect kind of testimony, not intended as such by the artist...

...At the end, Jacek's confession is cut short by his jailers because he's taking too long...

...The overall impression is one of transcendent modesty and a degree of realism, of humanness, we almost never see on screen...

...Krzysztof calculates the thickness and resistance of the ice on his computer, and even walks out on the ice himself to verify his findings before authorizing Pavel's skating...

...It is the story of a six-year-old Jewish girl in 1943 who was taken to the home of a couple who had volunteered to be her fictional godparents, but at the last moment withdrew their offer...

...The moviegoer is forced to think...

...she asks, holding him against her breast...

...Another significant link between the different films is the presence, in all but 7 and 10, of a sin-gle, silent observer...

...For example, instead of illustrating stealing with an action-packed bank robbery, Decalogue 7 deals with a mother who had previously forced her daughter- to whom she had never shown much affection-to sign over legal custody of her little girl (born out of wedlock), and now lavishes all her love on the granddaughter...

...The principal characters are different in each episode, but some return to play a minor role in another story...

...The movie does not treat his voyeurism as simply contemptible...

...to emphasize such relationships, Kieslowski hoped that The Decalogue would be presented two episodes at a time...

...Her humility and deep sincerity turn what could have been a combative encounter into a warm exchange...

...we only recognize the limitations of our resources...

...The Decalogue does not present saints and villains...

...Strikingly, these are real faces, the hair is real hair, the actors wear real clothes...

...He usually appears just be-fore the central character is to encounter a special challenge or to make a crucial choice...

...Kieslowski's awareness of film's capacity to raise questions is evident in an early narrative film, Camera Buff (1979), which describes what happens when a Polish worker gets hold of a movie camera...

...Our idea was very simple," Kieslowski said...

...The Polish director had achieved considerable critical and popular success for The Double Life of Veronique and for a trilogy whose titles were keyed to the French tricolor-Red, his last movie (1994), being the most successful...

...At first intending to chronicle only family events, the worker gets carried away by all that the camera can record...

...An immediate connection between the action and a specific commandment is hard to perceive, but you are caught up in a serious ethical dilemma...

...he is so shattered that he goes back to his apartment and slashes his wrists...

...It is a powerful moment...

...In the course of the film the daughter runs away with the little girl...

...The films," Kieslowski remarked, "should be influenced by the individual commandments to the same degree that the commandments influence our daily lives"-that is, only partly...

...the mother is apparently far away, but will phone for Christmas...

...Later, when Tomek is in the hospital, Magda begins to feel some compassion for him, and we see the world from her vantage point: "We're always looking at this love," said Kieslowski, "through the eyes of the person who is suffering because of this love...

...Although Kieslowski refused to sentimentalize the killer, there is a touch of humanity in Jacek's retention of a photograph of his younger sister, who had been killed in a tractor accident in his native village...

...The way in which those buildings are constructed and laid out limits the field of vision and this offered me many interesting compositions for the camera...

...What if, in the course of our lives, someone passed by that only those who are at some special crossroad are able to see...

...In believing too much in rationality," Kieslowski said, "our contemporaries have lost something...

...His intense look at the characters leads them to ask themselves questions...

...Kieslowski told a story that partly explains how he came to employ this device: One day, when several of us were discussing a film we had just seen...

...Nor does he offer any explicit openings to grace, as are sometimes suggested in the endings of Robert Bresson's films...

...the viewer sees only an opening number: Decalogue 1,2,3, etc...

...Because this inner, ethical struggle is the action, the emphasis is on close-ups...

...we see the same few buildings each time...

...The films do not pretend to provide answers, but to present questions...

...Is she "stealing" her own child (who has nightmares that only the grandmother seems able to soothe...

...No conclusions are offered, either...

...I love you...

...It was, however, aired on the BBC several years ago, and there is no good reason why public television here could not do the same...

...Planned as a series, the films take place in a large Warsaw apartment complex...

...But to get a sense of the continuity of his central themes, one has to hunt in special video stores for Kieslowski's earlier work...

...A Short Film about Killing (the ninety-minute version of Decalogue 5) is even more demanding in this respect...

...it is the only flashback of the series...

...if computers, like chess, do not provide all the answers, they do teach us that we constantly have to choose the best among several possibilities...

...Nothing is extraneous...

...This recurring figure is played by the same actor, although he wears different clothing in each episode...

...Kieslowski emphasized that in 6 the camera is always "looking at the world through the eyes of the person who is loving, not the person who is loved...

...we are simply made intimate observers of two sympathetic people who are struggling painfully for some sense of direction...

...The film stresses the chance factors that led to the cabbie's picking up his passenger, and contrasts them with the boy's cool determination as he prepares the rope he will use in the murder...

...That's what I want her to do because I take the questions seriously...

...You think of deer that would come to the edge of the farm, decades ago: their eyes wide with an ease of being alive, alert toward farm buildings, the creatures that walked between...

...She begins to think about the commandment...

...But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.'" This means that the relationship between the films and the individual commandments is "tentative...

...Zofia knows that Elzbeita is really addressing her: Forty years ago Zofia was the young woman who had refused to provide the asylum requested...

...One can believe without having to use certain words...

...Finally, he tells her that her husband will die...

...In Blind Chance (1981), which was banned after martial law was declared in December 1981, Kieslowski presents the different choices a person might make: cooperation with the authorities, work with Solidarity, or concentrate on one's career...

...Observing the moral chaos of society, Piesiewicz one day said to Kieslowski, "Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments...

...Finally, Krzysztof wanders into a nearby church, and overturns an altar and the candles that are burning before it...

...No abstract principle has been taught...

...What is distinctive is that sex here-unlike its presentation in so many movies-is never a titillating distraction...

...The degree of the spectator's involvement in The Decalogue is also affected by the fact that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz linked the episodes in suggestive ways...

...He is in that...

...he knows that his Aunt Irene believes that there is such a thing as a soul...

...But Dorota is insistent, even asking the doctor if he believes in God...

...I am reluctant to use the word God," Zofia responds...

...It is out of fondness for his son that Krzysztof gives Pavel his Christmas present-ice skates-ahead of time, while insisting that he can't try them out until the ice has hardened sufficiently...

...Whether she wants to or not, she is beginning to perform a certain intellectual work...

...Later, she picks him up at school, takes him to her house for lunch, and shows him pictures from her trip to Rome, including one of the pope...

...While suggesting that she herself has no one to call on, she asks the doctor to swear an oath...

...As the desperate father cries out at the end of the screenplay of Decalogue 1-a line not spoken in the film-"Who is there to turn to...

...the director insisted that he didn't exist, no such person was in the shot...

...A bright ten-year-old boy, Pavel, lives alone with his father, Krzysztof...

...What do you feel...

...I merely announce, for example, Decalogue 1. The spectator looks at the film and she would like to know what it's about...

...But he insisted that we accept moral responsibility for our choices...

...The project gradually took shape, the screenplays a product of their collaboration...

...Kieslowski believed that inflicting death was the highest form of violence and reported that his film crew was shaking while the execution scene was being rehearsed, even though they knew it was only pretense...

...Kieslowski, however, is not setting up a neat opposition between the aunt's faith and the father's excessive confidence in technology...

...A criminal lawyer in Warsaw who thinks of himself as "Christian rather than Catholic," Piesiewicz met Kieslowski in 1982...

...Kieslowski was born in Warsaw in 1941...

...She is now convinced, she says, that "there is no cause more important than the life of a child...

...Hhe deep humanism behind Kieslowski's minute observation of how people behave, both alone and in company, is equally evident in A Short Film about Love (Decalogue 6...

...It's only an average movie," he said...

...The silent observer is frequently visible in Decalogue 1, wearing a sheepskin coat and trying to keep warm in front of a fire...

...At the very least, the rights and wrongs of the situation are interrelated...

...In strict fidelity to the laws of movie-making, Kieslowski looks unflinchingly at a reality we can neither control nor fully understand...

...But I liked the burial scene very much, and the face of the man who was in black, at the left of the frame, was nothing less than sublime...

...The incident made an impression on me...

...Or has the grandmother stolen the child's affection and trust...

...Before the titles, there is a shot of a little girl under a porch holding the hand of an adult...

...Maybe the length and breadth of memory is meant to teach us how to want less and keep more, how to take comfort in wilderness even when it's veined through the self, how to let go of visible movement until time and awareness join the understory, and you recognize in the slanted grasses the breathing of a place you have more than once dreamed...

...Pavel is divided...

...In fact, the explicit statement of a commandment is never used as a film's title...

...It takes seven minutes early on in its first half for twenty-year-old Jacek to throttle a cabdriver and another five minutes at the end for the state to execute him...

...there is no forcing of emotion...

...after refusing to receive the little girl, in 1943, Zofia had worked to save a good number of Jews...

...His presence, however, is not intended to encourage pretentious symbolic readings or idle talk about angels...

...Two ninety-minute films, A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love, are versions of Decalogue 5 and 6 that have played widely in Europe, but the series is an unlikely program for your neighborhood multiplex...

...If you look closely, there is something interesting going on at their place...

...His most significant achievement, The Decalogue, remains largely unknown in the United States...

...Zofia invites the younger woman to her apartment and explains her past action as a choice not to endanger a resistance network...

...He ends up alienating the authorities with his indiscreet filming, and his monomania destroys his marriage...

...Tomek makes anonymous phone calls and even takes a second job as a milkman so that he can deliver bottles to her door...

...Jacek seems to have only the vaguest motives for the killing of the cabdriver, yet he is relentlessly brutal in the way he ignores the victim's pleas and finishes him off...

...Rather, by relating the commandments to contemporary situations, Kieslowski hoped to make them real...

...The director reminds us of the camaraderie between father and son in a sequence that shows Pavel coaching his father to victory in a chess match...

...Here, it seems possible to take one thought at a time, like footsteps, silence a storehouse deep as a leafaspen, not yet unraveling their true colors, keep a tremor of green...

...Jacek's attitude is paralleled by the impersonal efficiency with which the executioner prepares for his work...

...Kieslowski remarked that this figure had no influence on the action but that "he leads the characters to reflect on what they are in the process of doing...

...Tomek, a young mail clerk, uses a stolen telephoto lens to spy on Magda, an attractive young woman who entertains her lovers in her apartment, the windows of which face his...

...The doctor at first seems coldly unwilling to help, drily reminding her that science doesn't know everything...

...This means that you are often unsure of the relationship between a film and a particular commandment...

...They aren't cos-meticized or photographed to look their 'best...

...Everyone is more or less familiar with the Ten Commandments, and agrees with them, but no one really observes them...

...Father and son have a close relationship-Krzysztof gives the boy problems to solve on a computer-but, when Pavel encounters a dog frozen in the snow and asks about death, all he gets from his father is the definition from an encyclopedia: "the cessation of all functions of the central nervous system...

...We didn't want to adopt the tone of those who praise or condemn, handing out a reward here for doing good, and a punishment there for doing evil," Kieslowski wrote...

...It was never a question of photographing simple-minded illustrations of the commandments...

...Though not directly political, his films encouraged a critical spirit in a country dominated by a Communist regime that owed its place to Soviet power...

...Decalogue 2 is a good example of the complexity Kieslowski intended...

...in purely literal terms, the commandment against swearing a false oath may have been broken, but the decision has been made on behalf of life...

...Decalogue 1 shows us the rigor of Kieslowski's approach to filmmaking...

...When Pavel asks her, "What's God...

...When Magda finally agrees to see him, however, she destroys his unrealistic adoration by offering herself to him...

...The young defense lawyer knows his efforts are futile but listens sympathetically to his client's last requests...

...Although Kieslowski considered himself an agnostic, he acknowledged that "there are mysteries, secret zones in each individual," that somehow create a climate in which transcendence can be glimpsed even in the midst of an unbelieving society...

...It was produced for Polish TV in 1989 as a series of ten one-hour films on the Ten Commandments...

...The movie, Kieslowski noted, "is a description of the powers that meddle with our fate, that push us this way and that...

...The American expresses some surprise, though, that "I've never read anything in your work about God...

...Unlike the countless movies about violence that dominate our screens, it shows the horror of killing...

...After attending film school in Lodz, he gained a considerable reputation for making documentaries about contemporary Polish social life...