Dekalog

In the mid-eighties Poland was a place of exceptional tensions and crosscurrents. The gradual crumbling of totalitarian rule was conducive to a lively atmosphere in the Arts. This was nurtured by elements as varied as the rhetoric of Solidarnosc, skepticism concerning political ideologies, the lure of Western materialism, elements of inbred Polish nationalism, an ugly, reawakened anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for the spiritual values of the Catholic Church. It was at the height of this ferment, in 1988, that the director Krzystof Kieślowski and the writer Krzysztof Pieciewicz were commissioned to do a series of films for the State television. The writer, a criminal lawyer, suggested stories based on the Ten Commandments and the director was intrigued: “Our idea was very simple,” Kieślowski said. “The Decalogue is one of the ethical foundations of today's society. Everyone is more or less familiar with the Ten Commandments, and agrees with them, but no one really observes them” (Stok, 1993, p. 143).

In making this series of ten films for television, Kieślowski admitted that he and his collaborator did not worry about absolute compliance to the individual commandments. Many of the episodes have little to do with the commandment by which they are numbered. What they do have in common is an unusual unity of cinematic image and narrative. What is fascinating about these films, however, is the ways they confront and sometimes resolve problems that contemporary postmodern culture has found difficult to face, far less elucidate.1 Insofar as postmodernism is a response to the encroachment of market economy on the arts, the Communist world escaped it, and it is this privileged point of view that makes Kieślowski's work pertinent today, when artists are becoming aware of the pitfalls of a now-moribund postmodern aesthetic.

Overt references to politics are conspicuously absent from the films in spite of the fact that Poland was riven by social upheaval during the years Kieślowski