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152 The Human Touch Decalogue and Fargo One way of judging the importance of filmmakers is by looking at the kind of talk they generate among their audiences. Since the recent death of the fifty-fouryear -old Krzysztof Kieslowski during open-heart surgery, one of the key points of speculation about him is whether he knew when he announced his retirement a couple of years ago that he had a heart condition. As evidence that he did, one could cite the fact that the ‘‘twin’’ Polish and French heroines of his The Double Life of Veronique (1991) suffer from heart conditions, and one ultimately dies from hers; as evidence that he didn’t, one could note that Kieslowski was a heavy smoker and continued to smoke after his announcement (though he may have been simply reckless). And prior to his last heart attack he’d begun work with his longtime collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, on a script for a new trilogy structured around the themes of heaven, hell, and purgatory—not necessarily in that order.∞ A deeply controversial filmmaker on both sides of the Atlantic, Kieslowski can’t be deemed a greater or lesser figure on the basis of what he knew about his heart, but perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that his attitudes toward his characters are frequently ambiguous, the issues they raise never closed. Kieslowski’s ten-part 1988 Polish miniseries, The Decalogue—a work that can easily be seen piecemeal, because the films don’t depend on one another for their principal meanings—should be judged to some extent by the quality of the discussions it provokes about ethics. Each 50-odd-minute film recounts a story set in contemporary Warsaw in which a character breaks one of the Ten Commandments in some fashion, though Kieslowski is too cagey to identify overtly which commandment goes with which story or to explain other connections—such as why the Sixth Commandment, ‘‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’’ is represented by a story in which neither of the principal characters is married. His use of a different cinematographer on all but two of the ten films also makes each story a separate stylistic adventure, especially in terms of light and color. The greatest source of unity may be that nearly all the major characters live in the same housing project, so that major characters in one film are apt to reappear as minor characters in one or more others. (‘‘It’s the most beautiful housing estate in Warsaw, which is why I chose it,’’ Kieslowski once said, typically adding, ‘‘it looks pretty awful, so you can imagine what the others are like.’’) As another example of SPECIAL PROBLEMS 153 this kind of fascinating crossover—The Decalogue has several—the central ethical dilemma faced by a hospital consultant (Aleksander Bardini) in the second film is recounted as part of a university lecture in the eighth. All of the films in The Decalogue are easy and pleasurable to follow as stories, yet part of the excitement they generate stems from discussions about their meaning after their dramatic impact registers. As Stanley Kubrick pointed out five years ago in his brief foreword to the published script of The Decalogue, Kieslowski and Piesiewicz ‘‘have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talk about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what’s really going on rather than being told. . . . You never see the ideas coming.’’ Interestingly, postscreening discussions tend to be exegetical without ever becoming religious; some critics’ patter to the contrary, Kieslowski belongs to the agnostic Bergman camp, not to the mystical Tarkovsky one. The Decalogue harks back to a notion of conceptual art movie that reeks of the 60s—specifically, zeitgeist filmmakers like Antonioni, Godard, and occasionally Resnais—even though it’s exploring everyday urban life in the late 80s. The film can be comfortably situated in neither the Polish context of the Kieslowski features that precede it nor the Eurobabble New Age mysticism of the international coproductions that follow it (The Double Life of Veronique, Blue, White, and Red.) (However, it’s worth noting that there’s at least one intertextual detail that links the work of both periods: the imaginary Dutch classical composer Van der Brudenmajer, alluded to throughout the ‘‘Three Colors’’ trilogy as a kind of running gag, is first mentioned in the ninth film of The Decalogue.) By...

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