When the Chicago International Film Festival begins this Thursday, perhaps the single most important event of this year`s program will be the screening of Krzysztof Kieslowski`s ”The Decalogue,” a 10-part film from Poland that stands as one of the major artistic accomplishments of this decade.
Produced for Polish television, though it has not yet been shown on the state-run network, ”The Decalogue” is a series of hour-long episodes, each based-loosely and, often enough, obliquely-on one of the Ten Commandments.
Two of the episodes-numbers five (”A Short Film About Killing”) and six (”A Short Film About Love”)-were re-shot and expanded to feature length for theatrical release; it is these versions that the festival will be showing. The series begins at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 18, and continues nightly at 7 through Oct. 23.
That may sound like a daunting prospect, but ”The Decalogue” is anything but. Unlike such recent marathon movies as Rainer Werner Fassbinder`s ”Berlin Alexanderplatz” or Edgar Reitz`s ”Heimat,” each episode of
”The Decalogue” is self-contained, and the film is not designed to be shown sequentially.
”That would be murder in regard to the audience,” said Kieslowski, speaking at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, where the film was shown last month. ”That must not be allowed to be done.”
But even a casual look at one or two episodes creates the desire to see the rest, for ”The Decalogue” is clearly the work of a great filmmaker operating at the height of his powers. The series covers a dazzlingly wide range of human experience and human emotion, moving between the poles of comedy and tragedy as it probes the ethical underpinnings of everyday life.
The focus is neither religious (”That is for the priests”) nor moralistic (”A moralist is someone who gives answers. I just pose the questions.) Episode one, for example (”Thou shalt have no other God but me”), is a wrenching tragedy about a computer expert who trusts his machine to tell him whether it is safe for his young son to go skating on the neighborhood pond. Episode ten (”Thou shalt not covet they neighbor`s goods”) is a piercingly ironic comedy centered on two brothers who are at first indifferent to discover that they have inherited their father`s stamp collection, but then gradually become voracious collectors themselves.
The commandments aren`t identified at the beginnings of the episodes-they`re meant to be intuited by the audience, or occasionally, conveniently overlooked. ”There is of course a connection,” said Kieslowski, an intense, graying man who hides a cynical regard behind a huge pair of glasses, ”but often it`s a very vague one. In some cases, you could change the commandments to which each episode refers.”
The film draws its immediate unity from the fact that every episode is set in the same apartment block, a structure that can look wonderfully cozy or horrifyingly drab, depending on the eyes of the character through which it is seen (”It`s probably the prettiest housing complex in Warsaw, so I chose to set the stories there”).
Characters from one episode may turn up in the background of another: An ethics professor in episode eight poses the plot of episode two as a problem for her class; later on, the stamp collector of episode ten, still very much alive, drops by to show her his latest acquisition.
One character appears in eight of the ten episodes: a mysterious young man, apparently homeless, who enters the film only to look sadly and silently at the main actors. Kieslowski will not identify him: ”He`s the kind of stranger we meet sometimes, who stops us from doing something or otherwise affects our lives. We just called him `the young man` in the screenplay, and we should leave it at that.”
The deeper unity of ”The Decalogue” is, of course, a question of structure and style. Though each episode was photographed by a different cinematographer, creating a variation in visual texture that moves from the harsh expressionism of ”A Short Film About Killing” to the erotic glow of
”A Short Film About Love,” all were written in collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz.
”He`s not really a writer, but a practicing lawyer,” Kieslowski said.
”In fact, he has no idea how to write, but he is a very sensitive man. Our collaboration depends on exchanging ideas and viewpoints. It was he who conceived of the Decalogue films, and I have to say I wasn`t extremely pleased at first.”
The ”exchange of ideas and viewpoints” shapes each episode, as characters who have decided on one course of action encounter others-equally convinced, equally ”right”-who have settled on just the opposite. More than mere moral paradoxes, the films of ”The Decalogue” build to a sense of the immense difficulty-the near impossibility-of behaving justly and decently as soon as one moral system crosses another.
That the films are pervaded by a sense of failure and guilt is not simple pessimism, but the product of an idealism so acute and so elevated that it can only lead to disaster in the material world. Ethics are impossible, Kieslowski discovers, but it is impossible to live without them.
In its formal precision and analytical rigor, ”The Decalogue” might seem unbearably sterile, were it not for the intimacy and immediacy with which Kieslowski films each tale. He favors tight, crowded compositions, with foreground objects (often lightly out of focus) that emphasize the constricted freedom of the characters while drawing the viewer into the frame. His close- ups are often taken from a slightly tilted, slightly uncomfortable angle that brings out the vulnerability of the characters-the precariousness of their position in the world.
Kieslowski also possesses a powerful gift for discovering small, original gestures that seem to open up a character`s entire personality: There is, for example, a devastating moment in episode two when a woman who has learned her husband is dying slowly and coldly strips a potted plant of all of its leaves, her fingers moving with a controlled fury that perfectly encapsulates her anger and agony.
Through such moments, Kieslowski creates the sense-very rare in the movies-of a direct access to a character`s inner life, to the smallest fluctuations in feeling and train of thought.
The 10 episodes of ”The Decalogue” contain appearances by most of the leading actors of the Polish cinema, including Maja Komorowska, Krystyna Janda, Daniel Olbrychski, Grazyna Szapolowska and Jerzy Stuhr-all strongly marked personalities who here blend smoothly into the ensemble, adapting Kieslowski`s slow, spare rhythms without abandoning their individuality. If it were nothing else, ”The Decalogue” would be a perfect textbook on directing actors for the screen-the art of blending established personalities with the needs of a particular part.
”I try to give all of them a sense of freedom,” Kieslowski said, ”to let them feel that they bring more to the film than their craft. They use their life experiences, and I gain from them. I love them with all of their virtues and their faults, with all of their hysteria. I just tell them to act and to be themselves. We talk about their lives and my life, not about the characters. I`m aware that I`m really using them, which is why I want them to feel we are working together.”
Yet Kieslowski is not only a sensitive recorder of performances; his camera, too, is superbly expressive. In ”A Short Film About Love,” which takes off from the basic situation of Hitchcock`s ”Rear Window” (a teenage boy spies on the woman who lives across the courtyard), focal lengths are used to define emotional relationships in a way Hitchcock himself would be proud of. And there is even room in his work for lyrical flights, as when, at the end of episode two, the dying man`s recovery is expressed by a drifting pan that comes to rest on a glass of sugar water, the image slowly coming into focus to reveal a bee licking its surface. Life, in all of its bristling specificity, returns.
Kieslowski, who has been making films since 1969 (his excellent 1979
”Camera Buff” will be shown in the festival`s retrospective section), remains deprecatory about ”The Decalogue” and the sudden celebrity it has given him.
”This was not a monumental task,” he said, ”These are small films, inexpensive and easy to make. It took two years to write, and a year and four months to film. I had to make them all at once because I don`t work very hard, and lazy people have to force a certain self-discipline.
”I do not want to influence what people think or do, because I don`t know the answers. We are not the engineers of human souls, and to pretend we have an influence would be ridiculous. I make films because I want to talk to people, to have a chat.
”I make films only every three or four years, so now, approaching it mathematically, I should give myself a thirty- or forty-year rest.”
