Quickies, Vol. XXXI

The Double Life of Véronique (1991, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski) – A film that continues to challenge and provoke. Struck this time around by the very immanent nature of Kieslowski’s transcendence. Zizek thinks Kieslowski finds “God” a cosmic sadist (to use C.S. Lewis’ term), a rather mean child who toys with his creation for his own entertainment. Then Zizek goes on to perform neo-Lacanian analysis of Kieslowski’s own life (not his person, mind you; his life history), which renders his film theory very theoretical indeed. To boil down this film to something so dismissively simple seems quite unfair. The filmmaker here certainly toys with the notion that the Divine may not be purely gracious, but Kieslowski seems rather to suggest that it’s humanity’s idols that are vacant of grace and sovereignty, not the Great Other Himself. So the film constructs false gods in order to tear them down. On the other hand, the film also ends on a distinctly terrestrial note. For being so transcendent in nature, Kieslowski is a man of the earth.

12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam) – A wild ride, and one that deserves more than it typically gets. Having not seen a ton of feature-length adaptations of short films by different filmmakers, it’s probably not worth much to say that this is one of the best of that variety. Here, though, the colors, the lenses, the sets, the shots, and the music create something superbly surreal. What the film says about reality and sanity hearkens back to Gillian’s earlier Brazil, this time tapping into something more quintessentially “Nineties” in all of its end-of-the-millennium paranoia. Just when you think you’ve honed in on who the truly “insane” are, you’re thrown a curve ball. The crazy revolutionaries are too crazy really to be crazy. It may be the scientists, the professors, the intellectuals that are truly mad. Undoubtedly.

Somewhere (2010, dir. Sofia Coppola) – The grand prize at Venice? Unanimously voted? What else was showing at Venice? As Wife observed, this film reminds one of Maeby’s classic line in Arrested Development when it’s inadvertently suggested that she end a film with two characters walking across the ocean: “No, deep is good. People are going to say, ‘What the hell just happened? I better say I like it,’ because nobody wants to seem stupid.” Being one of those who appreciated Lost In Translation and even Marie Antoinette, perhaps we can state with some degree of credit that Somewhere seems to go out of its way to be “arthouse,” begging even lovers of Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson to use the big “P” word (pretentious) in describing Sofia’s latest. Yes, it’s wandering, fluid, elusive, exploratory; and not explanatory, straightforward, or all that structured. The point being made is not a difficult one, but the film presents it as difficult. This is essentially the definition of the “P” word.

Akira (1988, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) – Animated dystopia at its best, probably, but who watches much of it? Seems like such a time warp into the 80s, not to mention a space warp into Japan. Put those two together and you get something so huge and ideologically influential (not to mention aesthetically) that there are probably countless dissertations out there on the subject. The myth at the narrative’s center is easily the most interesting aspect of the film. After years of waiting for their god to resurrect, they stumble into the definitively postmodern fact that god is dead and guys with money have just been perpetuating the image of his existence for all this time.

Fanboys (2009, dir. Kyle Newman) – By geeks, for geeks, via geeks. A flatly objective satire on Star Wars followers would have equated them, ultimately, with Star Trek nerds. Instead, Fanboys, despite utilizing William Shatner himself, shamelessly betrays its preference for all things Lucas. This makes the project all the more endearing, and is probably exactly what led Shatner to agree to it (recall his infamous SNL rant). Those behind and in front of the camera are perfectly tuned into the confused sexuality of these tools, which not only disarms the films critics but gives the film’s social awkwardness that special ingredient of self-consciousness.

Galaxy Quest (1999, dir. Dean Parisot) – Actually watched this one the night before the aforementioned. As a former Trekker/Trekkie/whatever-they-want-to-be-called-these-days, Galaxy Quest really is the Star Trek equivalent of Fanboys. It is the equivalent in the sense that Trek people really are a more social crowd: gathering at conventions and submerging themselves in team heroism, too busy to flip their noses at Star Wars people. (Arguably, they know that Roddenberry could no more take down Lucas than the Gorn could take down Kirk.) Made for an older crowd than Fanboys, Galaxy Quest is a bit more laid back and takes even its satire less seriously than the former.

The Double Life of Véronique

While it would normally seem a travesty, a horrid injustice to submit a “great formal experiment” like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique to a(n) mundane/inane critical medium such as this, it is comforting to know that the great Pole would have likely smiled upon it. With a deep understanding of and affinity for the reality of subjectivity, the importance of the individual search for meaning, Kieslowski surely would not have balked to his films being considered in any possible way. He told once of encountering a young Parisian woman who, upon viewing The Double Life of Véronique, became convinced of the reality of the human soul. Surely a film, or any work of art, could not hope to achieve more than that.

It is, as has been noted before, an interesting oddity that such a trailblazer of cinematic form like Kieslowski would have begun in documentary and then shifted into a radically formal, narrative style of filmmaking. Perhaps this is especially fascinating in light of the shift in theme/goal from documentary (political) to narrative (transcendental, for lack of a better term). Indeed, one of the opening shots of The Double Life of Véronique overtly rejects politics as a realm of interest to this film. As the camera moves into a Polish village toward the home of Weronika, we see a large statue being trucked away. The statue identifies obviously with the fall of socialism in Poland, which had only taken place a few years prior to this film. Later, when Weronika and Véronique encounter one another (though only  one of them sees the other at the time), a political demonstration takes place in the background. As Joe Kickasola observes, the background nature of the demonstration contrasts with the priority given to the women as they converge on one another. The spiritual and metaphysical interests of the film and its protagonists cause political concerns to pale in comparison. One wonders if Kieslowski became disenchanted with politics and less optimistic that he could effect meaningful change or if the fall of the previous regime in Poland freed him to pursue matters of more importance to him.

The experimentation of form in this film, noted by Kickasola to be Kieslowski’s most formally ambitious work after The Decalogue, recalls both Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. Apparently toward the end of his life, Kubrick lamented to his friend Steven Spielberg that he had not been able to achieve a radical renaissance of film form in his life. Spielberg pointed to 2001: A Space Odyssey as a formal revolution, but Kubrick disagreed that that film reached the heights to which he strove. Kubrick was outspoken in his reverence for Kieslowski, so perhaps The Double Life of Véronique is what Kubrick had in mind. As for Tarkovsky, Véronique features certain little formal and narrative elements that recall, in particular, Solaris. Weronika plays with a small ball, one Kickasola connects with superstition/divination/spirituality, a ball that hearkens back to the recurring sphere shape in Tarkovsky’s sci-fi film. The spherical form, with its implications of eternity, fits both films and the concerns of both directors. Kieslowski’s admiration of Tarkovsky makes the similarity potentially intentional. Second, both films feature a brief appearance by a midget, and in both instances the characters have a kind of sideshow, carnivalesque presence that interrupts viewer expectations. Like Solaris, Véronique deals with desire and the lack of fulfillment found in (merely) sexual relationships. Moments of extreme intimacy are halted by much higher concerns: questions of existence, the self, and the other. Weronika’s embarrassment over the scar on her finger disappears when she sees on her wall the photographed image of herself, or perhaps of her other. Her smile indicates a comfort through her recognition of the image, which happily interrupts her romantic activity during what would otherwise seem to be a moment of extreme intimacy. Véronique’s lovemaking is interrupted later in the film, but this time it is the absence of both her image (or that of her double) as well as her real double (in the person of Weronika) that causes an opposite reaction: discomfort, fear, and emptiness. Rather than like Weronika’s reaction to the image of content vulnerability, Véronique is first drawn to an object nearby (an overturned lamp, which she clicks on) as an escape, then experiences shame and embarrassment as she attempts to cover herself even during the same type of romantic passion during which Weronika had been so carefree.

As Kickasola does well to note, the film begins with a brief double-preface of both Weronikia and Véronique as children, and in both scenes the time is Christmas. The first shot of the film is confusing to the viewer, who has no frame of reference until a reverse shot eventually reveals the point-of-view of a young girl being held upside-down while looking out the window in the evening. Her view is that of a horizon at dusk, and like her, the viewer sees it inverted. The night sky shows stars, strangely situated “below” the upside-down trees silhouetted against the luminescent remnant of the sun. It is difficult, knowing the context of “Christmas,” not to see here in the film’s first shots an overarching theme to everything that follows. The Christmas star signifies the search for the Divine, or the Other (what Slavoj Zizek would call “the Big Other”). All their lives, Weronika and Véronique have been looking outside of themselves and feeling a strong sense of not being alone, yet never able to put their finger on this reality.

When Weronika sits on a train, she holds up to the window (already offering a warped view of a townscape – interestingly, a cathedral most prominently) a small translucent ball with little stars frozen inside it. A close-up camera shot of the ball again gives the viewer the same point-of-view as Weronika, and once again the world outside is inverted while the stars grab our attention. The women in this film go out of their way to see the world in a different way than is the norm. Véronique’s playful photography while in the Polish town square (accidentally capturing the image of Weronika, her other) show this, along with Véronique’s fascination with the marionettes living out an alternate and yet not-so-alternate reality. Her attraction to the puppeteer is also suggestive of her search for the/an Other/other. Who is the puppeteer but the God-figure of the world of marionettes? Before she knows it is he, someone starts showing Véronique signs of his presence and interest in her. Once she discovers who it is, she is briefly intrigued by him, then offended by his work. While this might seem to convey an image of God as the cosmic sadist, it has been argued that in fact Véronique has misunderstood his intention. By creating two marionettes, one of Véronique and one of her double, he gives her a choice of course in life. In the same way that Weronika‘s death by music causes Véronique to drop her lessons and thus spare her own life, so the puppeteer has a “backup” puppet for Véronique. The image of puppeteer, in all its fatalistic and anti-free will undertones, is offset by the gift of choice he gifts to his marionettes. It would seem that Kieslowski is demonstrating the paradox of divine sovereignty with human freedom, and the natural or inevitable human reaction to rebel against it.

In the end, the image of trees from the beginning shot returns as Véronique comes back to the home of her father. Reaching out, she lays the palm of her hand on a tree, as if it comforts her in its solid grounding, something which has alluded her throughout the film. After the death of her other and her inability to understand the signs of the Big Other, she must return to the paternal realm. While this might seem an anti-Freudian notion, it might be best to understand it as a half-embrace of Freud and a transcendence of psychoanalysis. Whereas traditionally the maternal might be understood as the realm of the domestic, the mothers of both women are dead once they reach adulthood; they have only their fathers. The fathers are both artists, craftsmen. They create by drawing and constructing, using shapes and colors for beauty and for functionality. The picture of a transcendent Other, seen in the puppeteer, seems too much for Véronique to accept. The more immanent picture, offered by her father (not unlike that offered by Weronika’s father earlier), is the one she embraces.

Similarly to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the protagonist returns to earth, the elements, the paternal, following a failed attempt to meet one’s other and access the Beyond. Paradoxically, the protagonists seem to discover that the realm of the transcendent is in fact the realm of the immanent. This is not a panentheism being promoted; no attempt is made blithely to reconcile these competing and difficult realities. Rather, a true paradox is illustrated, one that accurately acknowledges the extreme challenge of encountering the Transcendent while necessarily rooted in the immanent.

Quickies, Vol. I

When there’s no time for thinking, let alone writing, time will be made for quickies.

Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood): Great, small movie. Eastwood is a competent director and as an actor, no one plays him better than himself. Has been called everything between “a sleeper hit” and “Dirty Old Man Harry.” Anyone remotely attached to the Christian tradition seems to like it a lot, for obvious reasons. It must be admitted that a slightly less cliched priest character is refreshing. On a social/ethnic/cultural level, it can be applauded for spitting at racists as well as self-proclaimed “progressives” who despise everything traditional and old-fashioned.

The Double Life of Veronique (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski): Much more to come, dv. Another Kieslowski masterpiece that dwarfs basically everything that’s popular in cinema nowadays. Beauty and death are somehow wed into a reluctant but unbreakable relationship.

Great Expectations (dir. David Lean): The work of a master in the hands of another master. Lean’s late career epics work not because he was an epic director but because he had the sensibility of an old-school British (viz., non-Hollywood) director. Other than those little old technical blips one finds in these older Kingdom films, this is basically flawless, even the casting.

In Good Company (dir. Paul Weitz): Every so often it’s healthy to remember what the masses find funny, admit that Topher Grace is kind of funny, and give Dennis Quaid (the poor man’s Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner) a proverbial slap on the back for sucking it up and maintaining his career.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (dir. Leonard Nimoy): They say II: The Wrath of Khan is best, but they take Trek too seriously. This one is best, not least because it’s the funniest, returning its characters back to the 60s, including even a dose of nuclear paranoia. They moved Monterey to San Francisco, they thought Leningrad would still exist in the 23rd century, and they got away with some serious history-altering. But with Spock swearing, McCoy back in control of his marbles (more or less), and Chekhov demanding directions to the “nuclear wessels,” it’s quite worth it.

Avanti! (dir. Billy Wilder): A silly movie that is, in its way, perfect. Billy Wilder is a master journeyman at this point. Jack Lemmon (like Eastwood, above) plays himself to a T. And instead of death and beauty coexisisting in reciprocated harmony (above again), we have death and comedy, with a slightly more tentative hold on one another. It’s post-code AND in Italy, so along with Wilder finally being free to unveil his actresses (along with Lemmon), the moral of the story is that it’s perfectly acceptable (even admirable) to cheat on your spouse, as long as you do it consistently with only one other person.

Decalogue VI

It isn’t hard to imagine Krzysztof Kieslowski responding to an accusation that his films might be overly transcendent or unreal by employing one of the most common and, indeed, self-reflexive cinematic tropes: that of the gaze. The nice thing about the gaze is that there is a world of clichés to work with, particularly the Rear Window/Peeping Tom/etc. image of the voyeur. In the 20th century and beyond, there’s nothing quite like that urban ability to look out one’s window, with the aid of a telescope or some binoculars, and look at things one probably shouldn’t be looking at. That Jimmy Stewart was one of the first to do so in a really popular film somehow made it less taboo, more forgivable. The creepy protagonist of Peeping Tom re-associated the voyeur figure as the guilty party – in both senses of the word. In that film, he is not only the one who commits evil deeds but the one who is plagued and even driven by childhood guilt of the most Freudian variety. Same goes for Normal Bates in Psycho.

The clichéd image of the peeping tom makes its presence in Kieslowski’s Decalogue VI all the more interesting. Neither the director nor this series of films is anything like “cliché,” even in the stereotypical “art film” sense. Joseph Kickasola notes that Kieslowski’s trademark aesthetic instrument of abstraction liberates Decalogue VI from its own clichés and creates a film that “transcend[s] the merely sexual.” Tomek, the main character, has an aura about him that validates his own seemingly disingenuous claim to Magda that he actually “loves” her. While watching her from afar and playing rather cruel pranks on her, his motives seem anything but sinister or even playful. He admits to previously gratifying himself while watching her but now insists that his interest is founded in genuine love. When she forces her sexuality on him, his reluctance and reactions (the immediate and the subsequent) again confirm that Tomek “sees” Magda’s life as impoverished by virtue of its enslavement to the sensual. Her inability to recognize the reality of transcendent love reduces Tomek to nothing more than overactive hormones.

Tomek, on the other hand, becomes likewise enslaved to Magda’s existence, setting an alarm clock to notify him to report to the telescope in his dark room. They are at first connected through difference, such as Magda’s milk (which spills, signifying her embrace of the sensual) versus Tomek’s tapwater. Both are alone, with Magda’s solitude (at points spelled out in games of solitaire) becoming all the more apparent in the nature of her amorous visitors. Her extreme sensuality contrasts with Tomek’s disregard for the sensual and his need for the transcendent, the real. Following Tomek’s suicide attempt, the tables turn and Magda becomes the looker, the voyeur, and he becomes the unattainable object of the gaze. It is no accident that Tomek’s apartment is above Magda’s, just as Tomek experiences a death and resurrection experience that finally enables him to transcend his obsession. When Magda comes searching again for him at his workplace and this time finds him, he says simply, “I’m not peeping at you anymore.” The expression on Tomek’s face recalls that of the Theophanes character, whose appearance earlier in this episode coincided with Tomek’s jubilant running with a cart of milk bottles after Magda accepted his request for a date. (Here the presence of milk serves a double purpose: (1) identifying Tomek with Magda for the first time; and (2) pointing to the recovery of the maternal, previously absent in Tomek’s life, as signified by him drinking only water.) The expression is difficult to describe, implying an inner understanding or peace. Theophanes’ almost-smile (perhaps the only time we see this in The Decalogue?) is a knowing one, suggesting a necessary step in Tomek’s development. When Tomek bears the same look on his face later, it is the look of one who has felt the kind of poverty that emptied him of the desire to live. Having arisen on the other side of his desperation, a contentment now resides in him that has evaded Magda, or that Magda herself has evaded. There is the feeling at the end of Decalogue VI that things repeat themselves, that human beings take turns in feeling pain, suffering, desperation, and hopefully peace. Tomek’s resolution is on display for Magda, who now must wrestle with the futility of her empty, sensual existence. Perhaps one of Kieslowski’s more “upbeat” films, in that it features a “happy ending,” the conclusion is one of neither consummation nor tragedy. In this way the film, carrying within it themes of transcendence, itself transcends narrative expectations.

As Kickasola also observes, Kieslowski here delves beyond conventional gaze/voyeur tropes. Often this theme is employed to titillate the viewer through suspense and/or eroticism. (It doesn’t take much to see this theme’s application to the very idea of “cinema”; hence Laura Mulvey and spectator theory.) Hitchcock and others have used the gaze to appeal to Freudian notions of power and sexuality. Often films from these directors, while ingenious from a technical point of view, are best understood using fairly basic film theory to parse them. Kieslowski acknowledges the erotic thriller nature of cinematic voyeurism but takes it to its inevitable destination: emptiness. The voyeur unconsciously or consciously translates the object of the gaze into an image tailored to his or her tastes and needs, and the image becomes, as Bono has sung regarding pornography, “even better than the real thing.” This is Tomek’s epiphany, the one that takes place temporally prior to the film’s diegesis. By the time we observe him observing Magda, he is already aware of the poverty of the image and seeks involvement with the object. His pursuit of her, however, fails at the discovery that for anything like “love” to work, both parties must surpass the merely sensual realm.

Trois Couleurs: Bleu

The Decalogue, IV-V

The Decalogue IV

Despite the more obvious fact that this episode of Kieslowski’s Decalogue is themed around the commandment “You shall honor your father and your mother,” I will refrain from inserting the commandments next to the episode headings as I did in the first post. As Kieslowski scholar Joseph Kickasola observes, Kieslowski himself doesn’t correspond the episodes with particular commandments, rather working more through the main point behind the entire Decalogue: “the deep ground from which evil emerges” (Kickasola, The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Liminal Image, p. 201). A note on Kickasola – his analysis of Kieslowski’s films are both critically rigorous and accessible, avoiding the seemingly universal tendency of academics to drown themselves and their readers in pretentious incomprehensibility. Rare it is to read a film scholar who writes humbly and authoritatively.

Decalogue IV revolves around a father (Michal) and his daughter (Anna), and the confusion that results at the suggestion that they might not be so related. Anna comes across a sealed note left by her long-dead mother with the inscription, “To be opened after my death.” She flirts for awhile with the idea of opening it, then apparently gives in. She confronts her “father” with the allegation that he is not her real father, but that her mother thought he would be a good stand-in for Anna. He responds to her anger with sorrow and depression, stating that he always had a feeling it was true but had no way of knowing. She, too, says that she felt it from an early age and had more than merely a daughter’s love for him. When she presses him, he too admits wishing for “the impossible,” that they might have a different relationship than that of a father and daughter. When she makes an advance on him, he refuses, treating her instead as the daughter she has essentially been to him. The next morning, Anna mistakenly believes that Michal has left her, so she runs after him, screaming, “Dad!” When she catches up, he says he was only going to buy some milk. She confesses that she never opened the letter, and they agree to go home together and burn it. After doing so, the charred remains of the note contain fragments implying that which they had both wondered, but the film closes with a renewed relationship and uncertainty about their biological relation.

Kickasola’s categories of immediacy, abstraction, and transcendence give helpful tools for understanding Kieslowski’s works. He defines immediacy “as the capacity of cinematic images to directly communicate, exceeding linguistic categories, yielding expressive and emotionally powerful impact” (p. 43). Kickasola goes on to say that immediacy “encompasses cinema’s ability to capture qualities of reality that are beyond articulation” (p. 45). Abstraction is “a visual strategy found in the cinema that deemphasizes the everyday representational approach to image and its referent(s) in favor of formal concerns” (p. 44). It “invites us to consider objects in a different way, apart from our everyday approach to the world. We are invited to reckon with form before content” (p. 49). Finally, transcendence connotes “a cinematic style expressing the immaterial and aiming to provoke metaphysical consideration in the audience. One should not confuse this term with the Transcendent (capital T), which is actually the immaterial object of transcendence (lowercase t)” (p. 44). Kickasola goes on: “Where words fail us, [Kieslowski's] art helps to span the linguistic gap to the transcendent meaning” (p. 56). Full justice won’t be done to Kickasola’s argument here (and these categories are only the premises of the argument). Suffice it to say, these categories are working in the realms of the aesthetic, metaphysical, epistemological, and phenomenological. They give a starting point for understanding Kieslowski’s cinematic language, which is particularly non-verbal, in the vein of Antonioni but more abstract and pointing toward a much more metaphysical/transcendent series of meanings and ideas. Abstract imagery in Kieslowski pushes the viewer to his/her noetic edges and sometimes beyond. Kieslowski never pretends to have pierced the realm of metaphysical answers, however, remaining in the realm of liminality – the space between. Kieslowski’s images, along with his ideas and meanings, push his viewers to the brink of knowledge, reality, understanding, and meaning itself. This seems particularly true in the case of The Decalogue, in which Kieslowski attempts to tap into both ends of human existence: the primal and the transcendent, the earthy and the metaphysical, the one and the Other.

The categories above seem best utilized not when they are directly applied to Kieslowski’s films, or moments in the films, but rather when they are recalled during those moments of intense abstraction. The images and concepts presented in Kieslowski’s films are not geared toward an elite group. They appeal to the immediate cognitive and emotional effect on human beings in general, and the categories explained above seem best reserved for those who want verbal explanations for them. All that to say, the following won’t interact explicitly with these concepts.

One of the strikingly helpful clarifications that Kickasola gives applies to the beginning of Decalogue IV, when Anna wakes up her father. At this point, the audience does not know the relation between the man and the woman, and their interaction is strangely ambiguous. She wakes him up, and he remains in bed. She pours water on him and as he reacts, she cries out happily, “It’s Easter Monday!” Kickasola writes that the old Easter Monday tradition in Christianity is to symbolize the celebration of the resurrection of Christ through jokes and pranks. He writes, “In some countries, on Easter Monday morning, men wake their wives with a spray of the perfumed Easter water as they whisper, ‘May you never wither.’ On Easter Tuesday, the favor would be returned, often by the bucketful” (p. 194). Anna’s dousing of her father introduces at an early stage an extra-filial element in their relationship. When Michal retaliates by soaking Anna, a moment takes place that further confuses the viewer. Not until later does the viewer hear Anna address Michal as “Dad.”

Other themes prevalent in Kieslowski’s works are suggested in the episode. One is that of the doubled character. Anna forges an entire letter supposedly written by her mother. At one point, she is told by a family friend that she is the “double” of her mother. The troubled chemistry with Michal suggests the possibility of her replacing her mother as Michal’s lover. Visual doubling through reflections further confirm the them, made particularly explicit in Kieslowski’s later film The Double Life of Veronique.

There is also the them of sight. Anna undergoes an eye exam between the time when Michal leaves town and returns. During the exam, the optometrist points to letters on the chart for Anna to read that spell out the English word “Father.” When Anna is determined to need glasses, the correlation with her paternal vision improves along with her ocular vision. The next time she sees Michal and confronts him about his status as her father, she wears glasses. The camera itself moves in and out of focus, oftentimes focusing the foreground while blurring the background and vice versa, suggesting that accurate vision and flawed vision coexist in the same frame of view.

Pregnancy recurs in this episode, recalling the second episode of The Decalogue. Michal’s telephone eavesdropping reveals Anna’s pregnancy scare, and later she tells him of an abortion she had at an earlier date. She informs Michal that she didn’t tell him because if she had, he would have simply told her to get an abortion, finding it the easy solution. Michal is devastated at this revelation, realizing that such a response is just as tragic and impossible as the idea that he be more than a “father” to Anna.

In each episode of The Decalogue there recurs a silent, nameless, but watching character. He seems disturbingly omnipresent and omniscient, casting a knowing view on the different characters throughout the series that communicates full knowledge and a divine disappointment with their actions. Kickasola presents a solid argument in favor of naming this character Theophanes, reminiscent of the divine appearances throughout the Old Testament. The One who makes these appearances is never given an explicit name, but he is equated with the Divine and serves different purposes: sometimes a warning, sometimes a judgment, and sometimes a blessing. In this episode, Kickasola notes that Theophanes’ presence is more dramatic than anywhere else in the series. As Anna sits on the bank of a lake, Theophanes moves toward her in a canoe. She battles whether to open her mother’s letter, holding a pair of scissors. She decides to open it, only to discover a second envelope. Theophanes emerges from the water and lifts the canoe above his head, walking past her. She decides not to open the letter, and we are given a view of Theophanes from behind. Kickasola notes that a psychoanalytic reading is more valid in this episode than in any other and points out that as Anna leans toward opening the letter, the canoe approaches her in a phallic manner. Once she decides against it, the canoe moves away from her in a shape and position resembling a white papal costume and hat. Whether these views symbolize lover and father is open to question, but certainly Theophanes’ ominous approach contrasts with his benign departure (p. 196).

The Decalogue V

This episode follows three different characters through their convergences and respective downfalls. It opens with a young attorney (Piotr) as he is questioned by a panel during his final exam over the issue of capital punishment. We are then introduced to Waldemar, a rather despicable cab driver with a sadistic sense of humor and a perverted disposition. Finally there is the main character, a young man named Jacek who is so inhumanly cruel and evil that the viewer can’t help but be deeply repulsed. His random acts of senseless violence range from lewdly spitting in a cup before leaving a cafe to pushing a friendly man into a row of sunken urinals and pushing a rock from an overpass onto a highway, causing what sounds like a major pileup. Eventually, Jacek follows through with a premeditated plan to hail a taxi, go to a remote area, and brutally strange the cab driver (Waldemar). After the murder, the scene cuts to the end of the trial in which Piotr has represented Jacek, who is condemned to death. Prior to a coldy filmed execution scene, displaying death by hanging in unflinching apathy, Jacek reveals to Piotr that his younger sister’s accidental death years earlier probably led to his despondent downturn. It goes without saying, then, that this episode corresponds with the commandment “You shall not murder.”

Despite the pure evil of two of the main characters, Kickasola points out that Kieslowski paints them both as evil in order to distance them both from the viewer. This is not the emphasis; rather, the point is the starkness of their deaths. Incidentally, no matter how cruel these characters are, their deaths stand out above their menacing acts as the most ugly scenes in the film. It should be added, too, that the Ten Commandments do not contain a prohibition against hurting or harming others per se. This has been noted as a criticism in the past. However, in the same way that the Ten Commandments were considered the summation of the entire Law of God in the Old Testament, so each of the commandments was considered the summation of any number of legal and moral principles that underlie them. Thus, the commandment “You shall not murder” contains within it the principles of doing any harm to another human being. It’s easy to see in this episode how mundane acts of human evil are in a sense “small murders.” When we see Jacek’s violence toward the man in the restroom, we feel Jacek’s murderous contempt for a fellow human and the sense of a small death in the humiliation of an innocent person. But even while Kieslowski wants us to feel the horror of ending human life, the film is not a tract against capital punishment. His cinema has never restricted itself to propagandist concerns, instead pointing to the implications behind such issues.

It turns out that Kieslowski, not wanting to limit himself to a single cinematographer throughout The Decalogue, chose a different cameraman for each episode. (Kickasola notes that this paid off later, as Kieslowski chose from among the lot for his later films.) This episode is appropriately dark, through the work of cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who “ordered over 600 custom-made, green filters for the ‘crueller [sic], duller, emptier’ look of the film,” which, Idziak said elsewhere, “should evoke the thought of urine” (p. 202). The reference to excrement is not only apropos to the aforementioned scene within the film, but to the nature of the film itself. This connotes another sense of the liminal – that which is not “part” of us but neither “not” part of us. It is the ugly, the horrible, the abject; these terms also describe murder itself and correspond to it on a psychoanalytic level. (This point, it should be acknowledged, is separate from Kickasola.) The idea is given further credence by the staging of the execution scene prior to Jacek’s hanging. Placed a few inches beneath the door in the floor is a plastic reservoir, implying the release of bodily fluids at or following the moment of death. Jacek’s spitting in his coffee cup and drinking from a stranger’s discarded bottle all point to the grotesqueness of fluids, whether entering or exiting the body. A scene featuring Piotr sitting at a table during his exam contains an abstract image of a transparent cup of hot water with a teabag placed inside. Not only does the image connect with previous episodes of The Decalogue, but it identifies Piotr with desirable rather than grotesque liquids. His tea and the setting in which we see it contrasts with the disgusting manner in which Jacek eats and drinks and then leaves his table. Further, Kickasola notes that the tea’s abstract placement in the filmic frame implies a metaphysical gravity: Piotr stands for law, justice, order, and contemplation of “weighty issues, of infinite and ultimate value” (p. 203).

There are, Kickasola observes, curious figures present at Jacek’s execution scene: physician, lawyer, and priest, along with the prison guards. Up to the end, Jacek’s insistence that he and his actions are one and the same remains a lingering question of the other characters. The trial judge earlier tells Piotr that he is too sensitive for his profession. His later breakdown in the film’s final scene illustrates his inability to separate himself from his job. The prison worker who works the rope crank during the hanging crazily yells with what seems like sadistic excitement as Jacek prepares to drop to his death. The executioner, the physician, and the priest, on the other hand, seem rather comfortably detached from their callings. The executioner stoically lights a cigarette in his mouth, then transfers it to Jacek’s, apparently unaware of the irony. The priest offers last rites in a textbook example of a religious figure merely “going through the motions.” Finally, the physician steps in post mortem to confirm Jacek’s death, callously turning his hanging body before lifting up his shirt to apply the stethoscope.

The execution scene cuts to a single-shot final scene, beginning with a long shot across a beautiful field at the end of which we see an odd light. The beauty we see here juxtaposes both with the scene before it and the frame that follows it when the camera pans left to capture Piotr, sobbing and screaming from his car, “I abhor it!” So far the episodes in The Decalogue have always contained at least an element of hope, which seems to be what the light in the field implies. Earlier, Jacek describes the death of his younger sister as having taken place in a field, perhaps now symbolic of Jacek’s earlier and better life. The steadfast light shining on the opposite side of the field is a distant beauty, but beauty nonetheless. It contrasts with the darkness of the rest of the film and is invisible to the characters but visible to the viewers. Though Kieslowski allows those within the film to despair, he suggests to the audience that despair isn’t the only option.

The Decalogue, I-III

Krzysztof Kieslowski was a cinematic genius, at the level of a Godard or an Antonioni but receiving very little credit for his work. His films elevate the art form beyond discussions of “influence” or “innovation” into a realm of beauty and the sublime, testaments of the complete harmony of theme, visual, dialogue, and all the rest that transitioned seemingly flawlessly from Kieslowski’s mind into the medium of cinema. Since his films, in this case The Decalogue, cannot possibly be considered as they deserve in essay form, this post will simply touch on a few aspects of the first three episodes of this series.

I: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

At the risk of oversimplifying the stated theme of this film, the story functions as a literal parable of the reliance upon technology over the supernatural; autonomy over theonomy. The computer to which the father and son rush as soon as they enter their home puts out a greenish aura over its slaves and their surroundings. Kieslowski’s close-ups on the computer screen offer the perspective of those who are enraptured with the information contained in the glowing box, immediately willing to bend their wills and actions to whatever it dictates. The explicit discussion of things divine, including the aunt’s desire to enroll her nephew in religious classes, juxtaposes starkly with the father’s scientific mindset, his unwavering certainty in his own calculations. His need to double-check the computer’s conclusion reflects his wavering faith even in the machine. Images of death, shattering, and cold all make this short film much more than the sum of its parts.

II: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The second episode hearkens back to the first in numerous ways: the shattering, the cold, and the idolatry of the scientific. The woman’s need to know if her husband will live or die contrasts violently with the contingency of his death on whether she will abort her child. Rather than deciding herself, she puts the decision in the hands of an apathetic physician who refuses to say whether her husband will die or not, until she informs him of her alterior motive of wanting to know. The incessant burning-away of her cigarette is the burning-away of time before either her husband or child dies, or both, or neither. Symbols of time, overt and subtle, along with claustrophobic framing add to the suspenseful effect.

III: Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy.

Division seems to characterize the third episode, often balancing the split screen through light and darkness. The man’s merely nominal keeping of the Christmas holiday (dressing up as Santa and giving gifts to his children) is exposed for the hypocrisy that it is when he quickly abandons and lies to his family on Christmas Eve to “help” his former lover. Blurred and ambient light fills most of the frames that aren’t blindingly white from the snow. Evident pain in both of the characters, whether or not sincere on the surface, gives meaning and depth to their otherwise meaningless excursion. The possibility of death becomes more painful than abandonment or death itself.