SOURCE: "A Great Polish Film-Maker: Krzysztof Kieslowski," in The Durham University Journal, Vol. LXXXV, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 131-35.

[In the following essay, Millar praises Kieslowski's Dekalog and La Double Vie de Véronique as examples of Kieslowski's greatness as a filmmaker.]

Krzysztof Kieslowski is not interested in Sin. In fact, he is not a 'theological' director at all, even though he is best known for his TV series Dekalog (The Ten Commandments) and its spin-off cinema films, A Short Film about Killing (i.e. the fifth commandment, Catholic numbering) and A Short Film about Love (sixth commandment), both 1988. But then who is a theological director? John Ford, with his Irish Catholic sentiments and Protestant hymns? Obviously not. The austere Robert Bresson? Bresson wisely cut out the theological verbiage when filming Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, keeping the drama—and the diary itself. (Bernanos' late Mouchette gave him less resistance a decade and a half later.) No, blasphemous Buñuel is the only convincing candidate—he used to read medieval theology for fun.

The films of Graham Greene's novels and stories (since Greene hid his real theological interests beneath a veil of convert's pseudo-theology) manage to lose the real stuff, keeping if anything only the pseudo; though there is a sense of evil in The Comedians (thanks to Lillian Gish) and a dash of other-worldly mystery in The End of the Affair. (The Quiet American is only political, and certainly not Greene's left politics; The Fallen Idol eschews ambiguity, to its own detriment, telling us: 'Adultery is good for you!')

No, Krzysztof Kieslowski, along with his Christian-rather-than-Catholic writing partner, ex-lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, is a philosophical director, if that does not sound even more off-putting. Worse yet, an old-fashioned (comparatively speaking) moral philosopher—Cambridge University called its philosophy tripos by the imposing title, 'Moral Sciences', so perhaps Kieslowski could aptly be called a moral scientist. Certainly people who imagine that philosophers discuss values and concepts are nearly a century out of date: philosophers discuss the impossibility of discussing concepts.

Kieslowski takes a well-known moral code—well, not that well known, since the Faber edition of the scripts gives the wrong (Protestant) version, numbering from 3 to 9 the commandments that are 2 to 8 in the Catholic (and, in English, Douay-based) version that Polish ex-Catholics like the agnostic Kieslowski and his free-thinking co-writer actually know … As I was saying, a known code that was not seriously challenged before the rise of collectivist Fascism and Red Fascism, i.e. Communism (pink Fascism is more fashionable in the West these days). Kieslowski, who does not acknowledge collectivism's challenges, subjects this code to testing, questioning, close examination in terms of values, judgements, ethics—one of his characters, in 8, is herself a professor of ethics who discusses abstract principles in the context of brief stories such as supply the basic plotlines for these short films: 'Once upon a time, our time, in this Warsaw housing estate of bleak apartment blocks and chill winds, there was a man who …' or, better yet, 'a woman who …'

The stories they tell are 'little' stories only in the sense of involving few people, often two or three, not in lacking a larger moral dimension. Apparently throwaway ones like 3—Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day (actually Christmas Eve) and 10—Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods, still involve a complex of family responsibilities and moral ties, their real subject. In 10, the only comedy, two brothers are divided by a stamp collection, left to them jointly by their remote, difficult father, a political prisoner for seven years too; but in the end they are reunited by its loss, after at first suspecting each other. Each section or film (there are recurring characters on the fringes, including a young man known as The Angel) expresses a word or concept, as the following selected list indicates:

1—Thou shalt not have strange gods before me … The maths prof, Krzysztof, loves reason, rationality, the materialistic; yet he discovers emotion when his young son, Pawel, is found drowned through skating on ice that ought to have been safe. The new American computer said it was all right, not having full data. In the script, the power station emptied hot water into the lake; but in the film the cause of the accident remains mysterious. Krzysztof attacks an altar to revenge himself in the god he does not believe to exist: irrationality is a strange god, too, but very popular in the world.

2—Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. The consultant surgeon does not want to play god in asserting or denying that his patient, Andrzej, is or is not dying of cancer—he is very seriously ill, though. But another potential life hangs in the balance: Dorota, Andrzej's wife is pregnant by another man, now estranged and never as much loved as Andrzej himself. Dorota is considering an abortion; but it is pointless if Andrzej dies. She might as well have someone to love and live for, the baby. (Maybe she might be reconciled with the father, it is just hinted.) The consultant, in finally telling her that Andrzej is as good as dead, half-lies, since he knows the X-rays are ambiguous, maybe positive. Having lost his whole family in one night during the war, he hates to think of termination; the abortion is cancelled (nowadays Dorota would find the greatest difficulty in booking an abortion at all in Poland). Following a miraculous recovery, infertile Andrzej has no difficulty in taking a second miracle in his stride: 'We're going to have a baby.' The consultant says: 'I am pleased, Mr. Geller, very pleased.'

3—Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day. For Jews, the Sabbath was a family feast, so Christmas Eve is substituted. Taxi-driver Janusz plays Father Christmas to his hard-pressed wife and children Antos and Kasia. Ewa, an old flame, then drags him off on a wild goose chase around the city, pretending to look for the husband who remarried and settled in Krákow years before. The cab damaged, Janusz has to pretend it was stolen to get it back. He promises his wife he will not see Ewa again. The choice between the roles of Father and Lover has to be and is made once and for all. Ewa is isolated:

      [Janusz + wife]
          [ex-husband + new wife]
                                        Ewa
      [Antos + Kasia]
          [2 children]

The grouping is symmetrical and she has no chance with either. The Family, the Sabbath, Christmas: these are the values that strive against the anarchy of love, with its late-night tristesse and morning regrets, another kind of hangover. (Interestingly, alcohol plays no serious role in any of the films; evidently Kieslowski and Piesiewicz do not eavesdrop much at confessionals.)

5—A Short Film about Killing (85 minutes, i.e. half an hour longer than the TV version). The young lay-about Jacek, depressed because his sister was killed in an accident for which he was partly responsible years before, fails to grow up and plans a clumsy murder of an old taxi driver, an obnoxious oaf but still a human being of sorts. Jacek fails to strangle him but bashes his head in with a rock. A young lawyer, newly qualified (newly a father too), defends him and pleads for his life, but with no success. The ritual is clumsily performed, with even Jacek embarrassed at the amateurishness of it all. However, he ends up duly hanged, and his excreta fall correctly into the pan beneath the gallows. The lawyer is upset, but everyone says he did his best; next time he will be less involved.

6—Thou shalt not commit adultery or A Short Film about Love. The longer film ends sooner, as I shall explain: the film version is therefore more ambiguous, since we do not know how Tomek will survive his suicide attempt and hospital recovery. Tomek, a teenage post office clerk, commits adultery in his heart and masturbation in his penis by spying on Magda, a thirty-something textile designer with a casually promiscuous lifestyle and a sour, discontented look after all her 'freedom' (even in ten superbly acted films, which do not seem 'acted' at all but are subtly stylised nonetheless, both Grazyna Szapalowska and, as Tomek, Olaf Lubaszenko, have to be mentioned as stand-outs, she can be glimpsed on the cover of the printed scripts, he cannot). Having been initiated by the son of his landlady, now on national service, he has gone one better than an old pair of binoculars and stolen a very phallic telescope (sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, Dr Freud). He times his meals round her sex life. Finally he takes her out for a coffee, and tells her he loves her, but cannot translate this into desire, let alone action. She leads him on and he comes too soon; that's Love, she tells him, a physical spasm. He cuts his wrists, spends time in hospital. She repents, talks to the landlady (who disapproves, naturally, of Tomek's choice). In the TV version, he finally emerges 'cured'; he no longer peeps or thinks he loves her—she is just one more almost middle-aged woman who wears her skirts too short. That's Love, that was.

7—Thou shalt not steal. A schoolgirl has a baby but her head teacher is also her mother and takes over the child. Six years later (as the film begins), the girl Majka, no longer a child herself, decides that Ania is her daughter, not her mother's and 'steals' her back, running away in a hopeless and disorganised fashion to nowhere and nothing, actually at first to her old lover, once a promising young teacher, now a maker of kids' stuffed toy animals. The pair of runaways, Majka and Ania, are soon caught, without much help from the police. Ewa, the mother, loves Ania better than her real daughter and hardly tries to conceal it. She has Ania back but Majka runs away again at once on the train—they were waiting overnight in a station. Perhaps she will kill herself, or just disappear and never come back, or go abroad … She will end up a loser anyhow, sad and waifish, unlike her robust little daughter.

8—Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. This is the only one of the series grounded in exclusively Polish experience of the War, anti-Semitism, patriotism (right-wing) v. Communism (Soviet-orientated) and so on. An ethics professor, Zofia, meets her American translator, Elzbieta, who turns out to be a little Jewish girl whom she refused to help during the War, on grounds of religious conscience. She had originally agreed to act as a fictitious godparent or witness to the child's Christian baptism; a priest had also agreed to pretend to have baptised the girl. Instead their refusal is really based on information, obtained by Zofia's late husband (he had died in a communist prison) through his work in army counter-intelligence, that the couple who were subsequently to hide the girl were Gestapo agents. The man, a tailor, had then been cleared of suspicion just in time (unlike the British film, Orders to Kill, for instance, in which the order of execution is countermanded too late), only to end up in the same prison cell as Zofia's husband, though he had survived and been released. By sheer good luck the girl had also survived anyway, and now forgives Zofia: she had herself been a 'false witness' of what had occurred, which as a child she had seen without understanding. She meets the tailor who would have sheltered her; but he refuses point-blank to discuss the War. Zofia then tells the priest the good news, forty-odd years late. During the complicated confusions of the War and occupation, 'everyone has his reasons', in the much-quoted phrase of Renoir (or 'Everyone is right') and the difficulty lies in seeing the whole picture. Actually, the film is about bearing false witness FOR your neighbour (or not), since it is quite normal, at least with ex-documentarist Kieslowski and ex-lawyer Piesiewicz, to think by opposites and contradictions.

9—Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife. In this story of adultery, the emphasis is less on the adulterous couple than on the cuckolded husband, who covets his own wife (medically, the writers are off-target in that libido declines with waning powers; but on the more important distinction between sex and love, they are right). Since Roman is impotent rather than, like Andrzej, terminally ill (or not), the treatment is slightly more comic, though in a dark mode. Having spied on his wife and apparently seen her ending an adulterous affair, he decides on suicide when her ex-lover follows her to a ski resort to which she has gone for a few days on her own. As Roman is ineffectual as well as technically impotent, his attempt is half-hearted and he survives. Even when treating their characters with a touch of cruelty, Kieslowski and Piesiewicz invariably regard them with affection. Unlike, say, Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, who uses her antipathy and contempt to sometimes brilliant effect, e.g. in A Fatal Inversion.

Kieslowski maintains that all the Dekalog films have 'happy' endings; but this can hardly be true of 1—the drowned son; 5—the hanged teenager (though opinions may differ); or 7—the lost daughter, i.e. Majka (not Ania, who is briefly lost only during the hour the film lasts). Also questionable are 3—the barely surviving marriage; and 6—in either version, especially the TV one, where Tomek seems emptied of life and love, while Magda is hardly ready for a new start (the point of the film version may be to leave her future more open and even promising: maybe she can rediscover Love). 10 might seem dark enough as comedy goes, with its sinister stamp dealers, half-mad guard dog, heavy metal bars (possibly reminding Artur of his musical style as a struggling 'rock star'), and atmosphere of mutual mistrust, but in fact it is funny. Though the brothers lose the collection (stolen) and Jerzy loses a kidney—ironically swapped to make up a now missing set—they rediscover each other and their belief in one another.

To sum up, what do these words analysed really amount to? GOD: NAME OF THE LORD: HONOUR: FAMILY: SABBATH: FATHER: (NOT) KILL: LOVE: (NOT) STEAL: (TRUE) WITNESS: COVET: WIFE: GOODS: BROTHER: EQUAL. Is this enough for a 'philosophy' or basis for 'doing philosophy'? One could be cruelly reductive, and say it is just a code for a Christian society in a socialist (rather than red fascist) context; and therefore already too dated by events to be still relevant.

However, the films shared the FIPRESCI (International critics') prize at Venice in 1989, and in 1991 Irène Jacob won Best Actress at Cannes for her dual role in La Double Vie de Véronique. So presumably the critics, or their representatives, saw more than just humanistic worth in the films: not superhuman values, but a visual style of distinction, based naturally on the counterpoint of the rigid horizontals and verticals of those grim blocks of flats (so surprisingly middle-class in occupation) and the diagonals at which the camera is so consistently and naturally placed—solving the riddle of why all the films (with the obvious exception of Killing) really look much alike, despite the involvement of so many cameramen and directors of photography, and certainly like the fully realised work of one director with a distinct vision. The vision is not really oblique, but seems so because lack of hypocrisy is itself embarrassing, raising too many questions: 'We didn't want to adopt the tone of those who praise or condemn, handing out a reward here for the doing of Good and a punishment there for the doing of Evil. Rather, we wished to say: "We know no more than you. But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one!'" So says Kieslowski in spring 1990, after preparing the scripts for publication. Having instanced the theme of capital punishment in Killing, he adds: 'We endeavoured to construct the plot of this film so that the viewer would leave the film with the same questions in mind which we had asked ourselves when the screenplay was only an empty page fed into the typewriter.' The Brechtian notion of forcing the audience to question rather than accept is implicit here; and in this instance so is the Brechtian conviction of having access to the correct answer already. But the example is untypical of Kieslowski, if typical of Brecht, an author of much more rigid opinions, not necessarily self consistent.

Cinematic style is a combination of sound and vision, obviously. Even to non-Polish speakers, the terse, often tense quality of the dialogue exchanges, particularly between a man and a woman, is evident as much as the angle of framing; the brisk rhythm of cutting, always in tune with what we want to know next; the subtly stylised acting which appears so naturalistic that we are slightly surprised to recognise a well-known star face (Krystyna Janda; Daniel Olbrychski). There is also the command of narrative, of telling the story, that no great film-maker, however apparently casual or even slow, ever really loses; the fine, unbroken thread of attention to a particular world that may be quite strange to us but is wholly convincing while the movie runs (Kieslowski is an artist but he is not arty).

The same tight, sympathetic style informs the first (Polish) half-hour of Véronique; the French hour, set in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, is slightly less secure. Kieslowski's sense of milieu falters slightly, becomes vaguer, despite such brilliant episodes as the chase on foot through the streets of Paris (Véronique on the run from her future lover, a distinctly fey childrens' author and puppet manipulator—you could do better, Véronique, with your looks and your forceful personality or—dare anyone say it now?—greatness of soul, we can't help thinking). Maybe the double-soul theme, regrettably artificial when spelt out, was intended to make this point about moral scale, as is having a larger budget and a fancier shooting style, travel shots ad lib. Kieslowski remains, though, a very physical, sensual maker of films: there is no overt sex in The Ten Commandments, not really in Love itself, where it is left to our imagination. There are a few brief sex scenes in Véronique but by current standards they are very mild (and why not? It is too easy to be vulgar nowadays).

Poland has not produced a great film-maker since Andrzej Wajda, the latter part of whose career was bizarrely mixed in quality (Zanussi never really made it, especially not with British audiences). Though he is now 45, Kieslowski has only just begun as a world-class director. It is too easy to think of eight or nine hours of television as the equivalent of a month's episodes of Neighbours. Yet Jean Vigo's reputation is secure on hardly more than a third of that as a lifetime's work. Our own documentarist, Humphrey Jennings, took a decade and a half, his entire career to clock up some 500 minutes of film (Kieslowski himself began as a documentarist out of film school in Lodz). Dekalog is a major achievement by any standards; and Véronique shows promise of more to come.

During the 1980s, Hollywood has stood still or gone backwards. Fringe countries—Sweden, Poland, China, Australia and New Zealand; but not in general Britain, France or Italy—have turned out the vintage wines of the movies. With the ten TV films and two cinema versions, Kieslowski has presented us with a whole case of the best. Let us be grateful; appreciate; above all, enjoy.