Ten hour-long films for Polish television, one for each commandment, all set on the same Warsaw housing estate (1988–89)
Dekalog
Film · European
Krzysztof Kieślowski
1941–1996 · Polish
Cinema of moral anxiety; late European art cinema
Krzysztof Kieślowski began in documentary, abandoned it over the ethics of filming real people, and then made two of the great cycles of modern cinema: ten hour-long television films on the Ten Commandments set on a single Warsaw housing estate, and a trilogy named after the colours of the French flag. He announced his retirement after the last of them and died two years later, aged 54.
How to spot them
- ▸Chance, coincidence and the lives we might have led; strangers glimpsed passing between films
- ▸Zbigniew Preisner's scores, often attributed within the films to an invented Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer
- ▸Cold light through glass; a hand, a coin, a bottle at a bottle bank
- ▸Co-written with the lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz from the mid-1980s onward
- ▸A silent, watchful old man or woman appears somewhere in most of the late films
Key films
A taxi driver is strangled with a length of rope, and the young man who did it is hanged; the film gives both deaths the same unblinking length (1988)
A Short Film About Killing — Jury Prize at Cannes and the first European Film Award for best film
A shy postal worker watches an older woman across the courtyard through a telescope (1988)
A Short Film About Love
Two young women, one in Kraków and one in Paris, who never meet but share a life, a voice and a heart condition (1991)
The Double Life of Véronique — Irène Jacob won Best Actress at Cannes
A widow tries to erase her old life in Paris, haunted by a blue crystal chandelier and an unfinished Concerto for the Unification of Europe (1993)
Three Colours: Blue, with Juliette Binoche — it won the Golden Lion at Venice
A Polish hairdresser, humiliated by a Paris divorce, smuggles himself home in a trunk and gets rich enough to take revenge (1994)
Three Colours: White — Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin
A model befriends a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbours' telephone calls in Geneva; the director's last film (1994)
Three Colours: Red, with Irène Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant
A factory worker buys an 8mm camera to film his baby daughter and turns it on his workplace instead (1979)
Camera Buff (Amator) — his breakthrough, and a film about the ethics of filming
Key ideas
- Chance: a train caught or missed can open entirely different lives, as in Blind Chance (1981)
- The moral law tested on ordinary people in ordinary flats, without the Church and without the state
- Liberty, equality and fraternity taken not as politics but as private predicaments
Quick-fire facts
- •He trained at the Łódź Film School, being admitted only at the third attempt
- •He gave up documentary partly after footage he had shot was sought by the authorities as evidence
- •Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a defence lawyer, co-wrote all his films from No End (1985) onwards
- •Zbigniew Preisner scored the late films and invented the music of the fictional composer Van den Budenmayer
- •Dekalog was expanded into two cinema features, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love
- •A Short Film About Killing is often credited with helping bring about the suspension of the death penalty in Poland
- •He was nominated for Oscars for directing and co-writing Three Colours: Red
- •He announced his retirement from filmmaking in 1994 and died in Warsaw on 13 March 1996 after heart surgery, aged 54
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Krzysztof Kieślowski — awards and selections
- Danusia Stok (ed.) — Kieślowski on Kieślowski