SOURCE: "Testament of the Father: Kieslowski's The Decalogue," in Film Criticism, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Winter, 1997–98, pp. 51-65.

[In the following essay, Perlmutter asserts, "Although glimmers of hope and oxymoronic moments of a kind of desperate joy temper the suffering throughout the ten films [of Kieslowski's The Decalogue], their message is clear—the Ten Commandments exist in our consciousness but are most often beyond our realization."]

The Decalogue marks an important midpoint in Krzysztof Kieslowski's career. As a kind of serialized melodrama, it consolidates his move from documentary to fiction after he first explored the disadvantages of the documentary form (the "truth-telling" genre) in his early fiction film, Camera Buff. The ten episodes are also building-blocks for the four feature films—The Double Life of Veronique and Blue, White and Red—that follow. Similar narrative situations are fleshed out; character types and visual forms persist as thematic moral connotations deepen.

Although with The Decalogue, Kieslowski ostensibly abandoned political issues for more universal moral concerns, in a Kieslowski film, the personal cannot be severed from the political. The struggles of his characters with identity, career options and parental responsibilities, emanate from Kieslowski's ambivalence towards his own repressive "father"-land, which seems to hover in judgment over his Polish characters like a vengeful Old Testament patriarch.

In The Decalogue, Kieslowski intensifies forms and metaphors that relate to basic issues, like the attempt to "save" family and children from dangers that range from human pride and petty rivalries to deep moral corruption. He calls attention to these concerns with a ubiquitous angel-like figure who haunts the various segments. Functioning as a silent witness to their futile efforts at liberation and self-realization, the "angel" underscores the tremendous emotional cost to Kieslowski's morally confused characters in their desire to change life patterns.

Since the Polish filmmaker's untimely death, his films more than ever seem like ghost stories—not the horror film variety, of course, but the visionary kind, as in the works of Tarkovsky and Wenders. Kieslowski's ghosts are spiritual and cinematic emanations of some internalized moral conscience that grows in proportion to his sadness about Poland and human powerlessness. In his corporeal absence, Kieslowski has now begun to function as an authorial ghost whose phantom presence inhabits his cinema.

In his early fiction films—Camera Buff, Blind Chance, and No End—Kieslowski's protagonists try to escape the entrapment of their highly-charged politicized world, but they pay a heavy price. At the end of Camera Buff, Filip, a budding documentary filmmaker, abandons family and job and turns his camera on himself, subsumed by his new occupation. Determined to film in a society rife with moral ambiguities and hidden political agendas, knowing that freedom can be exercised at the expense of others, Filip chooses to record his interior life rather than risk the possibility that his work might be modified and used in the interest of the state. His life and philosophy become the material for his creative work when, symbolically, in his final reflexive gesture, he passes through his "looking glass," and, like Alice-in-Wonderland, enters his own dream world.

The search for self-realization that leads Filip to his painful abandonment of documentary filmmaking parallels Kieslowski's own dissatisfaction with state manipulation of this so-called objective genre. With fiction as his new mode, the Polish filmmaker could critique the government by implication as he probed sub-surface reality (sex, death, internal feelings) not accessible to the documentary form.

Although in Kieslowski's early fiction films after Camera Buff, his characters become increasingly resentful of political intervention and the wretched state of affairs in Poland under socialism, they also feel victimized by the vagaries of chance and coincidence. His next film, Blind Chance, is about absent or misguided "fathers" and personal goals that conflict with state or familial responsibilities. A cynical film about the capricious outcome of human choices, Blind Chance follows a medical student named Witek through three alternative stories and three different compromises, all of which end with his inability to escape from Poland. In the various segments, Witek succumbs to political and peer pressure, waffles on moral responsibilities, agonizes over his uneasy relationship with his father, and finally, when he chooses an ostensibly neutral apolitical career, he is nevertheless frustrated by "blind chance." For all his protestations of freedom of choice and attempts to evade political machinations and oedipal duties. Witek is trapped in a world ruled by expediency, human frailty, father substitutes, and in the end, death.

Despite the clumsy handling of the three-part sections, Blind Chance represents the beginnings of Kieslowski's commitment to a form of serial narrative that poses what-if questions about life-style choices. The film's strength comes from the suggestion that despite its denial of a traditional single-line story, the protagonist is still essentially trapped—because he has been shaped by a common environment within an oppressive system (specifically, Poland under socialism).

Most of Kieslowski's characters are severely constrained in their efforts to adopt alternative life-styles. Filip renounced all social ties to gain a pyrrhic independence. Blind Chance gave its hero three chances to get out of Poland. Rather than accept tyranny, the female protagonist of Kieslowski's next film, No End, "chooses" suicide to join the ghost of her dead husband, a betrayed Solidarity lawyer. A lugubrious tonality throughout the film expresses the unbearable heaviness of living in Poland. With a musical score that is like a lament, the film is a jeremiad about the state as the punitive "father" of a country racked by purges, rigged trials, and growing anomie. Fundamentally renouncing state-controlled "professionalism" (the form of socialism in Poland under martial law), No End suggests that the only "happy ending" (the film's original ironic title) is to join the virtuous departed souls. They are all around us, Kieslowski claimed, as spectral reminders of our unexamined moral obligations. For all the denials and rejections that pervade Camera Buff and Blind Chance, none equal the harsh indictment of Poland under martial law in No End. With human action both base and fruitless, the only recourse for the morally pure in Kieslowski's homeland, lies in departure—in death.

Given Kieslowski's history of translating the malaise and frustration of aspirations in post-communist Poland into stories of oedipal and other patrimonial conflicts, it seems fitting that his last Polish project, The Decalogue, is loosely based on the ultimate patriarchal proscriptions, the ten "Thou shalt nots" of the Old Testament. Kieslowski himself has described the films as "cries of alarm," warnings of bleakness and evil in a country cut adrift from autocratic socialism and without re-established moral standards.

Born out of Kieslowski's desire to focus on decent people faced with "essentially fundamental, human and humanistic questions," the ten one-hour films were apparently designed as apolitical melodramas. Made for Polish television, they use strategies of multiple characters acting out typical TV-soap situations, like family problems and issues of distress or disaster, that take place in a single locale. Yet they refrain from the high production values, glamorous stars, and romantic notions about heroism common to mainstream narratives.

The ten sections of these fables unfold in a minimal Warsaw housing project where neighbors live in an atmosphere of anonymity and occasional hostility. Moving within a wide range of human weakness, from vanity to murder, almost every character prevaricates, some steal, while others engage in adultery or voyeurism. Generally in states of anxiety or anguish, they find themselves on paths that lead to terrible self-reckoning. Questions about parenting (from adoption to incest) are present in almost every segment, as are biblical allusions to the sins of the fathers and attempts to love one's neighbor. Often, more than one injunction is inferred in a particular segment, and at times, the same characters, motifs, and moral questions reappear in other sections.

These connections are reinforced by parodic counterpoints or reversals among the segments. The first two stories, for example, are both concerned with characters who attempt to defy commandments one and three: playing God as a form of blasphemy, they rely on their belief in the certainty of human reason. In Decalogue 1, an intellectual convinced of scientific infallibility makes an erroneous prediction and loses his only son; in Decalogue 2, a doctor who has lost his own world (his family during the war), gives what turns out to be a false prognosis (that a patient will die) in order to "save" an unborn child.

These first two parts of The Decalogue pose unresolved or ambiguous questions that thread the entire series—about parental responsibilities and "saving" children from potential disasters. In Decalogue 3, an illicit love affair threatens to spoil a family gathering on Christmas day, but paternal duty prevails. After a night riddled with schemes, lies, and betrayals by an ex-mistress, the protagonist returns to his home and rejects a romantic liaison in favor of family and fidelity. Decalogue 4 is an enigmatic rendering of the fifth commandment to honor one's parents. Although it is unclear whether a sealed letter is opened which may state that the man who reared the protagonist is not her real father, the letter serves a salutory function. It gives both characters a chance to strike a balance between an unanswered biological question and a shared emotional history as father and daughter.

Decalogue 5, which relentlessly explores the commandment against killing, including capital punishment, is concerned with a young murderer, alienated from societal connections and made brutish by urban inhumanity and an indifferent state bureaucracy. As in so many of Kieslowski's works, the patriarchy, both familial and socio-political, is held accountable for tragic consequences.

In another reversal of similarities between two sequences, Decalogue 6 also centers on a callow youth who suffers from a lack of familial or cultural sustenance, but instead of becoming a killer, he turns against himself after multiple infractions—stealing, eavesdropping, and lying. In Decalogue 7, about two mothers who battle over the possession of a child they share, a shameful teen-age pregnancy, abduction, and Solomonic questions about the nature of "true" parenting are couched in a nexus of lovelessness that has passed on from one generation to another.

With the commandment against bearing false witness as its basis, Decalogue 8 concerns a professor of ethics who, ironically, is confronted with a moral decision she made during the Holocaust that could have doomed a Jewish child. Decalogue 8 directly questions the dictates of conscience and personal responsibility when faced with the possibility of "saving" a life, especially that of a child.

Like Decalogue 6, Decalogue 9 is also about lying, voyeuristic eavesdropping, sexual jealousy, and attempted suicide. Unlike Decalogue 6, however, this sequence ends on a positive note with a decision to adopt a child and an affirmation of the strength of love, marriage, and family.

With wry wit (echoed again in White), Decalogue 10 parodies the idea of the sins of the fathers. Two brothers left with their father's legacy of a valuable stamp collection are plagued by cheating, robbery, and betrayal until they realize that their filial attachment is their real inheritance. The ironic tonality of Decalogue 10 illuminates how much Kieslowski shares the special Eastern European comic sensibility born of human myopia and impotence.

Together with the team that collaborated with him from No End through The Tricolors (Blue, White, Red), Kieslowski created his own brand of visionary-moral realism. Luminous images, filtered plays of light, mesmeric music, and frequent use of parallels and premonitions combine to transmute prosaic life into lyrical meditations on the fragility of existence. In Kieslowski's metaphoric cinema, mysterious occurrences erupt like poltergeists responding to a world in disarray, as in Decalogue 1, where an ink bottle spills without cause and a computer starts up on its own. His is a discomfiting style that conveys both the unexplained immanence behind the surface of objective experience and the malaise of his sympathetic but morally weak characters.

Although nine different cameramen worked on The Decalogue, the entire series shares a consistency of tone, texture, and hallucinatory cinematic rhetoric. Characters are usually plunged in semi-darkness and observed across court-yards or along dingy corridors. They see and are seen only partially. Separated by framed devices (doors, windows, mirrors, louvers) and connected by a series of visual skewers, they meet and interact, grope towards each other in a tapestry of coincidence, subliminal communication, and unspoken need.

Habitual crossovers of intersecting characters and coincidental encounters become weighty, mysterious signifiers. Protagonists in one series turn up as minor characters in another. In Decalogue 5, the dying man and his wife, who play prominent roles in Decalogue 2, are waiting for a cab, as if anxiously en route to the hospital, and they are treated rudely by the taxicab driver. Certain motifs recur across sequences: candles and altars in Decalogue 1 and 8 act as ironic icons of revelation; milk as a symbol of purity and, when spilt, a metaphor for lack of nurturing, reappears in Decalogue 1, 4, 6; in almost every segment, characters make bets or play games of chance as if believing they can control their own destinies. Suggesting the hostility bred by a repressive society, each section has its share of antagonistic or indifferent people. Sometimes a single banal moment in one episode takes on added meaning in another. When the father in Decalogue 4 has unwillingly admitted his sexual attraction to his adopted daughter, he picks up a toy bear, which reminds him of his paternal role. The toy turns up again in Decalogue 7, where the little girl's real father turns out to be a maker of toy bears, while the segment as a whole is concerned with the difficult distinction between a biological and a surrogate parent.

In almost every sequence, bizarre metaphoric moments punctuate the overall somberness and become satirical reminders of human folly and moral ambivalence. In Decalogue 3, a melodramatic situation is interrupted when the harassed couple enter the vast space of a railroad station late at night and discover a female guard skate-boarding along the empty corridors. In Decalogue 8, after an elderly ethics professor has been forced to confront her failure to fulfill a past promise, she meets a contortionist, who invites her to mimic his wild flexibility. The physical distortions echo the casuistic manipulation of her moral values when faced with the opportunity to save a child.

Despite all the common elements, however, each episode of The Decalogue has its own individual thematic and formal emphasis. In Decalogue 5, green filters exaggerate the already yellowed, dingy urban setting. Almost all ancillary characters are dyspeptic and inhospitable, creating an atmosphere for the alienation of the sociopathic killer. Motifs of thrown or suspended objects foreshadow the detailed and dramatic execution by hanging. In the first shots, a wet rag is carelessly thrown down from a window above as a sign of the indifference of the residents; the disturbed protagonist chases away the pigeons of a complaining old woman; he watches a violent gang attack, then hurls rocks at cars from an overhead trestle; later, expressing repressed frustration, he plays with the cord that becomes the murder weapon. Like an ironic talisman of brutality by state, individual, or even the crass murdered taxidriver, a miniature severed head with a grotesque smile hangs ominously from the rearview mirror of the victim's taxicab.

In Decalogue 6, reflexive doublings, optical devices and distancing camera views evoke, the voyeurist theme of Rear Window. Materñal issues are elaborated in Decalogue 7 by continuous references to children. The segment opens with the sounds of a crying child being soothed by a surrogate mother. Later, after a school play, her real mother, still a child herself, abducts her own daughter and takes her to the home of her child's father, a toymaker, where the little girl lies ensconced against his stuffed bears. In Decalogue 9, associative editing creates foreboding connections. As in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, the couple seems to respond to each other telekinetically—at a distance. The wife awakens with a start just as her husband has a biking accident. Other ominous warnings are made by cuts to an unanswered telephone or by the repetition of the parallel white lines of two different highways—as her bus speeds home and he bikes towards disaster.

Starting with a shot of dead fish in an aquarium and a coffin thrusting towards us, Decalogue 10 is filled with images of entrapment. Alarms, locks, nailed-down windows, and a ferocious watchdog represent the extraordinary measures taken by the two brothers, heirs to their dead father's valuable stamp collection. The punk rock song (from the group called "City Death") that begins and ends the episode adds a satirical note of defiance against all the commandments ("Everything belongs to you," so kill, steal, covet, etc.), and ultimately, against all "fathers."

This modern version of the Cain and Abel story, as well as its lesson about the malevolence of materialism, brings The Decalogue back full cycle to Decalogue 1, the segment most heavily invested with Biblical imagery and the eternal conflict between man and God. Structured like a fundamentalist tract that invokes both Testaments, Decalogue 1 moves the main character along the path from transgression (the breaking of the first commandment due to idolatrous worship of science and reason) to punishment (the carrying out of an Abraham/Isaac sacrifice), then anger, and finally, to a kind of desperate understanding and acceptance. In frustration and pain, the protagonist overturns an altar of lit candles and watches the wax run down the face of a Byzantine icon, matching his own tears. Then he kneels and out of a wooden trough lifts up a luminous frozen disc, a lens of milky glass like his blurred vision and tragic enlightenment. In despair, he presses the wafer to his face, as an act of acquiescence to the "Host."

This stuff of transmutation, miracle, and revelation play counterpoint to the protagonist's belief in the certainty of human reason. Nowhere is his hubris more poignantly revealed than in the sequence where he delivers a lecture on the computer as a linguistic intelligence that will one day be capable of an act of choice. Meanwhile, the boy, a spectator in the back of the auditorium, manipulates a slide projector that creates a parallactic view of his father's image. It is as if the boy, already sensitized to spiritual matters (by the absence of his mother, the piety of his aunt, and his foreboding experience of finding a dead dog), perceives his adored father within the frame of human limitations. The child thereby puts into question the father's prognostication that a machine will someday be capable of judgment. The notion of the fallibility of human reason is embedded in the projector's partial field of vision, while the rectangular screens of the computer and television mock myopic reality. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of gazes between the boy and the dismantling shots of his father is crosscut with the recurring image of a strange witness to the father's tragic transgression. Seated beside his campfire, this non-intervening "angel" turns to look off-screen, as if towards impending exterior forces. With the interpolation of luminous substances and cinematic references, Kieslowski synthesizes presence and absence, matter and spirit, real and illusion. All the signs coalesce to warn of the danger inherent in human pretension to the role of creator. The commandment to believe in the ineffable is pervasive in a multitude of metaphors: the primordial elements (fire, ice, water), the use of liquid substances to suggest the miraculous (a cracked milk bottle, spilt ink, melting wax that forms tears on a religious icon), the Godlike eye of a self-generating computer, and the presence of a strange witness who appears and vanishes at crucial moments. The injunction of the second commandment against the graven image is reinforced by the haunting subliminal image of the absent boy on the pernicious TV screen.

The Decalogue, Kieslowski's last Polish production, sums up a number of his central concerns. Its brooding, crepuscular tonality is in keeping with the desperate world of its characters, isolated in the misguided belief that they can direct their own lives. Writing about the feature films that extended Decalogue 5 and 6, Charles Eidsvik indicates how they reflect Kieslowski's despair about his "moribund land" and suggests that in such an alienating country, murder in Decalogue 5 provides a way of escape, while voyeurism in Decalogue 6 represents a pathetic means of trying to connect with others.

As if it were possible to control their fates, even change their country, history, and their very bodies, Kieslowski's characters make bets, play games of chance, and attempt to strike moral bargains. The thematic notion that human experience is unpredictable and devoid of wished-for alternatives is reinforced by consistent narrative strategies. Kieslowski's propensity for serial (or omnibus) narration is energized by his revision of traditional angel movie yearnings to rectify old mistakes.

Seriality as a form of narrative provides a canvas that allows for changes in character and complexity rather than the simplicity of a central consciousness with only one outcome within a discrete film. Since so many of Kieslowski's multiple characters, especially in the Polish films, usually end up only partially achieving their dreams or a second chance, serial narration also demonstrates the tenet that it is impossible to change character or role. It is as if the absent creator has tried every device to help his characters alter their life plans, yet, ultimately, they can never totally escape—themselves, destiny, or their author.

Filip, in Camera Buff, discovers that living a life according to movies and outside of conventional societal traps results in a bittersweet solipsism. In Blind Chance, the protagonist tries three alternatives, all of which end up demonstrating a lack of moral certainty, either within institutions or privately. In No End, death is paradoxically the only hope for a better life.

In The Decalogue, a group of characters living within a single realm blindly and ineffectually grope for guidelines, only to discover that the universe is really ruled by indifferent chance. Their moral confusion is further exploited by the non-diegetic presence of an apparent "angel," who, contrary to most of the benevolent spirits of traditional angel movies, does not intervene or offer flawed characters a second lease on life.

A persistent presence, the angel-like "young man" (as Kieslowski refers to him throughout the script), is mute and outside the diegetic events. Though sometimes noticed, he barely makes eye contact and has little interaction with the other characters. Yet in each segment he has some symbolic significance, since he appears in different guises, crops up at critical moments, and often serves as either counterpoint or catalyst for the actions of the protagonists. In Decalogue 1, in startling contrast to the professor's highly structured life-style, he is a homeless person, sitting outdoors near the fateful frozen lake beside a makeshift campfire. Once, as if in anticipation of the imminent tragedy, he appears to wipe away a tear, and for a fleeting moment, the professor connects the "angel's" disappearance from his accustomed post with the horrifying premonition of his son's accident.

In Decalogue 2, the mysterious stranger is a hospital technician who appears twice in sequences that concern important moral decisions. He walks by just as the doctor is absorbing dire information about his patient and reappears when the adulterous wife tells her critically ill husband that she loves him. In Decalogue 3, the "young man's" trolley almost collides with the taxi of the protagonist who is hellbent on an obsessive, ultimately questionable mercy trip.

The "angel" turns up again in Decalogue 4 rowing a kayak at the moment when the young daughter appears to decide not to open a fateful letter. In fact, in a series of crosscuts as he nears her on shore, she seems to return his gaze, while an assertive musical accompaniment suggests the possibility that he may be an almost telekinetic restraining influence. The music resumes later, just as the "young man," carrying his kayak, passes by at the episode's moment of "truth." The daughter has convinced her assumed father (whom she had accused of lying) that she too had lied about opening the letter, and they return to their original familial relationship.

In Decalogue 5, the "young man" is a land surveyor who crosses the path of the fateful murder vehicle and seems to shake his head in a disapproving "no." As if subliminally warned, the prospective murderer shrinks back into the shadows, but only for an instant, since he subsequently commits the heinous act. The "young man" is seen again during the trial seated next to an older woman in tears (who could be the murderer's mother) and just before the idealistic attorney learns that he has a newborn son. Thus, the "angel" is present at a paradoxical moment, where a reminder of the defendant's blighted childhood and imminent death is counterpointed by signs of birth and hope.

The intersection of encounters in Decalogue 6 occurs at two highly charged moments. Happily returning from his first meeting with the woman on whom he had spied from a distance, Tomek bumps into the "angel" and says "sorry." They pass each other again just after the young woman, in mockery of Tomek's naiveté, has induced him to premature ejaculation. Thus, the "angel" is present at both self-awareness and disillusionment. He reappears in Decalogue 8 as one of the students in an ethics class when difficult moral questions are discussed. The editing choices at that moment—a series of shots between him and the ethics professor—suggests that he functions as a conscience for the contentious issues exemplified throughout the series. In Decalogue 9, he is a biker who impassively observes the attempted suicide of the frustrated husband.

This puzzling non-diegetic presence provokes contemplation. Is the figure some allegorical reminder that filial relations as well as ambivalent choices can fail when commandments are broken? Is he a witness, a foreboding of accountability? to the characters? to ourselves? And from whom? And would intervention alter the outcome of choice? Are film spectators guilty of eavesdropping, like Kieslowski's voyeurs—Tomek in Decalogue 6, the impotent husband in Decalogue 9—and therefore, are they already dimly aware of the angel as an omnipresent witness to their own transgressions?

In his silence, marginality, and non-intervention, the angel-like figure suggests that there is neither easy solution nor metaphysical release in Kieslowski's world of characters who try to navigate some moral field out of the trivia of their daily existence and symbiotic interdependencies. On their own, within shifting perspectives, glimmers of regret, and crises of consciousness, they can only divine that they might have loved better or acted with more humility and courage. Ultimately, the young man may be a narrative connective to a shared, dimly remembered origin of sin, abandonment, and obsession that binds us in a universal fate, the tragi-comic human condition of corporeality.

Now that Kieslowski is dead, the ephemeral and yet visible presence of the angel of The Decalogue takes on an even more ghostly meaning, especially in the light of a documentary made just before his death, Krzysztof Wierzbicki's I'm So-So … A Film On Krzysztof Kieslowski. At one point in the bio-film, Kieslowski wryly reveals that, although he will not tell where or why, he has often secretly turned the camera on himself in his films.

Whether or not this intensely spiritually aware "agnostic mystic" (as he describes himself) has consciously inserted himself, Kieslowski's characters are haunted surrogates for his cinematic "passion"—a quasi-religious mission to use the camera as an ethical conscience that will surmount conformity and external repression in a world eroded by compromise and self-delusion. His commitment to a transcendent cinema is expressed in magical realist forms and metaphors: oblique angles, refractive light, repeated images of water and other liquid substances, atmospheric effects, things that move as if on their own, distorted "mirror" shots, and "bliss" images (like prismatic effects and radiant emanations) that seem to light his characters from within and convey a sense of weightlessness.

If, as Kieslowski claims, filmmakers really make only one film all their lives, then the most indelible image of his career is the ghost lurking behind the screen, hiding inside the camera lens, and hovering over Poland, urging us to reverse the decline of freedom and morality and to reestablish a spiritual world that will find compassion for the powerless and the perplexed.

Although the ten character studies of frailty or hubris serve as pretexts for displaying the futility of political or social action in Poland, they are also a fertile setting for Kieslowski's preoccupation with the tenuous balances among pragmatism, desire, freedom, and the relationship between man and God. According to Kieslowski, God may be the "absolute judge" who exacts obedience, but he is also absent and therefore remains only an "ideal reality" or "point of reference," against which we inevitably resist, rebel—and sin. For Kieslowski as for Kafka, guilt is presumed, sin inevitable, questions have no certain answers, and the knowledge of universal laws exists without the lawgiver. In a sense, the Ten Commandments were handed down because of God's absence, and we live with both the freedom and the dread of disobedience. In Kieslowski's brand of emotional nihilism, we may think of ourselves as free agents, but we are really governed by irresistible passions and biological imperatives. Even without the threat of punishment by the state, human nature, according to Kieslowski, cannot readily follow its own principles of moral behavior. Although glimmers of hope and oxymoronic moments of a kind of desperate joy temper the suffering throughout the ten films, their message is clear—the Ten Commandments exist in our consciousness but are most often beyond our realization.