Video Commandments
SKINNER, DAVID
Video Commandments Kryztof Kieslowski comes to Blockbuster. BY DAVID SKINNER Video cassettes and DVDs are the paperbacks of cinema. Just as Penguin has been a ready supplier of literary classics,...
...It was in 1983, after Poland's years of martial law, that Kieslowski directed No End, the heroic anti-Communist film that made his critical reputation abroad...
...The voyeur in number six can't live very far from the mathematician in number one...
...You should do it.' A terrible idea, of course...
...After watching Decalogue's ingenious stories illustrate the sometimes exquisite difficulty of doing right and avoiding wrong, it is worth asking, What if Hollywood made a movie or a television series loosely based on the Ten Commandments...
...Blue, White, and Red are based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively...
...Huge, cold, and forbidding, it is teeming with these morality plays...
...Yet, in the movies of Kieslowski, Poland's problems became secondary—and a serious moral vision took center stage...
...Kieslowski's documentary work led to his membership in a small but determined circle of filmmakers who referred to themselves as the Cinema of Moral Anxiety...
...Though most critics focus on the moral ambiguity of the ten parts, there could hardly be anything less ambiguous than devising ten stories around the Ten Commandments...
...In Workers '71, Kieslowski collaborated with several other directors and three different crews to make a huge political portrait of the working class that was to show how laborers' own views differed from party propaganda...
...A mathematician believes only in what can be measured and pays with his son's life for ignoring God's presence in the physical world...
...The lesson wouldn't be any more blunt if it came with a six-foot priest to knock the wind out of you...
...Number ten ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's") tells the comic story of two estranged brothers—one a bourgeois, the other a singer in a punk band—who become passionate philatelists after jointly inheriting their father's almost priceless stamp collection...
...I'd lost my gloves...
...The Communist orthodoxy left a whole reality of people and things to be described for, it seemed, the first time...
...And though Kieslowski won some measure of fame with his tricolor series of films (Red, Blue, and White) in 1993 and 1994, his work has never been very accessible...
...She wants the doctor to see her husband and surmise the man's chances of survival...
...Thus opens a relation that is bound by grudge, need, and obligation...
...Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments,' Piesiewicz [his writing partner] said to me...
...Just as Penguin has been a ready supplier of literary classics, Blockbuster and the other video-rental outlets have become important purveyors of great movies and television—and thanks to them you might, on a Saturday night with nothing to do, come across a half-obscure gem like Decalogue, Kryztof Kieslowski's set of ten short films about the Ten Commandments...
...Politics plays an even greater role in the 1970s documentaries Kieslowski made after graduating from film school in Lodz (also the alma mater of Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski...
...The neighbor introduces herself and the physician says, oh yes, he remembers her...
...Far from being a group portrait of exceptional people living in exceptional circumstances, this is a picture of everyman and every-woman in everyday circumstances...
...Indeed, the series has been celebrated, by film critics anyway...
...Moral dilemmas bump into each other on the elevator...
...If he is going to live, she wants to abort the pregnancy...
...Having resented their father all their lives for spending money on stamps while they as children went hungry, the brothers suddenly find there is almost nothing they won't do to extend the collection...
...They sound like something a sophomore philosophy major might think up after pulling an all-nighter...
...Of course, you can get those movies at Blockbuster, too...
...The doctor, however, has many reasons for hoping that the man will live and the child will be born...
...Didn't she, the doctor asks calmly, run over his dog with her car last year...
...The neighbor reveals that she is pregnant, but not by her husband, who happens to be seriously ill...
...During these years Kies-lowski made several politically outspoken films that were pretty much banned, except for small professional screenings that a large number of writers and artists tried to sneak into...
...Thou shalt not kill" would be observed in the breach as the muscle-bound action hero annihilated the bad guys...
...Part professional claque, part school of thought, the group was united by the twin desires to honestly depict Poland's fraying social fabric and to make life better for their countrymen...
...The women would surely be sexy enough to make coveting your neighbor's wife understandable...
...A physician is visited by one of his neighbors, an acquaintance...
...The connective tissue of the ten stories is an enormous Soviet-style building complex...
...Consider the most successful film he made before Decalogue: the 1985 political ghost story No End...
...Thou shalt have no other gods before me" would probably be amended to "But make time for yourself...
...While newspapers bulged with articles in praise of HBOs The Sopranos and Sex and the City, practically no one noticed as the Decalogue series slipped past customs...
...Take the woefully earnest ideas behind Kieslowski's tricolor trilogy...
...Exactly what that moral vision is, however, has always been hard to pin down...
...It is about a labor organizer, a dead lawyer, and the lawyer's widow, who rightly suspects that her beloved husband is haunting her...
...This was of course the same period in which the democratic movement made its historic strides...
...It was cold," he said in an interview...
...And there is nothing whatsoever ambiguous in the story the first episode tells about the commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me...
...Greed is upstairs and down the hallway, so to speak, from adultery...
...ulist venues such as the Lincoln Center film festival...
...Even while making movies that attacked the party, he claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the problems individual members faced...
...It was raining...
...A mixture of humanitarian feeling and fatalism about anyone's chances of doing good fills the ten films in Decalogue with both a sharply accusing moralism and a profound sense of human limitation...
...For all that Kieslowski achieved in Decalogue, he was blasé describing its conception...
...In the bargain, a piercing tale of a family torn by an unusual species of greed startles the viewer by becoming a first-rate caper...
...Mom and Dad would be overbearing...
...But critical acclaim, not critical mass, is all one could expect for ten movies, each an hour long, that debuted on Polish television in 1988...
...Of course, all ten films had been shown before in the United States, though only at somewhat less than popDavid Skinner is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The film was never released...
...Unfortunately, during production, sound tapes were confiscated and Kieslowski was interrogated by the police...
...Though one can find it on videotape, it's never been popular, perhaps because to an American it sounds like a Demi Moore vehicle written by the AFL-CIO...
...the audience would have to know how hard it is to "Honor thy father and mother...
...Bluntness is certainly not a fault of the second episode—which leaves you mystified about its illustration of the second commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain...
...But it wasn't until the late 1980s, when he exited politics entirely, that Kieslowski became a great filmmaker...
...In fact, one might describe the second half of Kieslowski's career as a string of bad ideas that were made into exceptional movies...
...In one interview, Kieslowski both described communism as evil and characterized belief in it as a mere intellectual mistake...
...Many of his storylines have translation difficulties that go well beyond subtitles...
...Last fall, Blockbuster started renting out copies of Decalogue at a significant number of its 5,000 stores nationwide...
...Shooting documentaries was an excellent career choice, he believed...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 25
