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I jog north through Kensington to Estonia, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. A Dutch guard notices me, but he’s disinterested. I navigate to Greece through Holland Park using my phone and the printed maps I have with me. The embassy is at the top of the hill. I’m not happy, but I am forgiving: I’m close to the end now. It’s one thing to watch “For All Mankind” and recognize our place in a vast and indifferent universe, but quite another to see things on a granular level and grapple with the egocentricity of human existence, to dig into the narrow reality of our lives and appreciate how — for all of our laws and guidelines — we’re ultimately a planet of unsupervised children. Dekalog: One" revolves around the story of a university professor and his young son living a life tethered to the certainties of science and mathematics. The professor believes in the power of logic and computation, considering them the guiding lights of existence. But the universe has its script, and the realms of certainty and belief collide, unraveling a tragic tapestry that explores the paradoxes of faith, loss, and the pursuit of truth. The Main Characters The series’ erasure of such contemporary Polish realia as politics, breadlines, and ration cards resulted in criticism on its domestic broadcast as being removed from life, though that partial removal was recognized elsewhere as a form of universalization, giving Kieślowski’s work new accessibility and breadth of applicability. But although quite a few Poles, or at least Polish critics, may have viewed it as not really documenting anything, Dekalog in fact extends his earlier documentary project in multiple ways, as description feeds into speculation. This goes beyond the retention of typical documentary modes of shooting and framing, such as the following of characters pointed out by filmmaker and academic Charles Eidsvik. More important is Kieślowski’s desire to register the nontransparent, the reality that his film school thesis, on documentary, had described as having its own dramaturgy.
Most of the moral issues are interpersonal and affect only the characters in the film. Piesiewicz’s influence is more apparent when the moral issues begin to overlap with the law; he was a practicing lawyer at the time and later a member of the Polish senate. Some of his writing is based on cases he experienced. For instance, in Dekalog: Seven a young woman attempts to “steal” her biological daughter, the consequence of an earlier affair with a teacher, from her parents, who have adopted her as their own. The “ownership” of her daughter is ambiguous, but the law is both crystalline and insufficient to resolve the situation. Piesiewicz worked on a similar case through his legal practice. I maintained the apps for a couple of years, adding new features, and promoting them on social media. I gradually lost interest in the “business” side even whilst the apps were still very popular, and focussed on my studies instead. By the time I started university I’d also lost interest in the UI and technical problems of the apps: I’ve probably spent more time worrying about the line spacing of Keep Calm and Carry On posters than anyone else in the world.a b Tanzer, Joshua (20 January 2001). "A perfect 10 - film review THE DECALOGUE (Dekalog 1 through Dekalog 10)". Offoffoff. Archived from the original on 27 December 2009 . Retrieved 6 June 2017.
When Roger Ebert taught Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog ( The Decalogue , 1989) at the University of Chicago, he had difficulties pairing the Ten Commandments with the ten films. According to Ebert, “there was no 1-1-correlation” (1). In the American DVD release of the film, however, each film is explicitly paired with a commandment. Dekalog, j eden ( The Decalogue 1) is paired with the commandment “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” This pairing is perhaps the least controversial. The film, which Ebert describes as the “saddest” in the cycle, tells the story of an atheist computer scientist Krzysztof (Henryk Baranowski), his son Pawel (Wojciech Klata) and their misplaced faith in the knowledge of humanity. Even Ebert suggests that the film fundamentally concerns the computer as a “false god”. As a film enthusiast, you understand the richness of diverse cinema. That's why we ensure that each film, such as Dekalog: One, is accompanied by subtitles in various languages, including Arabic, English, Portuguese and Russian, to bridge the gap between cultures and to provide an inclusive cinematic experience for all. The way this effort to map limits builds upon film’s normal preoccupation with the parameters of a shot or scene becomes apparent in Dekalog: Eight’s class discussion of the complex anecdote underlying Dekalog: Two—Dorota, previously unable to conceive and fearing the consequences of her pregnancy’s testimony to an affair, feels she can bring it to term only if her husband dies of the cancer afflicting him, and therefore importunes his doctor to tell her whether this will happen—and a story of a child’s wartime abandonment. Ethics professor Zofia concludes the class discussion by stating, “We’ve taken this far enough.” Is this simply because the class has run out of time—it breaks up a moment later—or has the issue genuinely run its course? The question becomes pointed when Zofia later mentions the need to think things through to the end—as if they may not arrive there of their own accord. Denmark is my favourite. The building, which also houses the Icelandic embassy, starkly contrasts with just about everything else on Sloane Street. Almost all other Belgravia embassies are white houses with pillared porches. Its size surprises me: Denmark has a population of less than 6 million. Other larger countries have much smaller embassies.Ten commandments. 10 episodes. 10 hours. When it first aired on Polish television in 1989, decades before long-form filmmaking would come to be regarded as the last bastion of auteurism, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog” was one of the most immense undertakings the cinema had ever seen. There had been longer works, and more lavishly financed ones — even when accounting for inflation, “Dekalog” would qualify as a micro-budget project — but the existential girth of Kieślowski’s magnum opus immediately made it feel like a monolith among molehills. Instead, let’s find goals that are easy to implement, and that if implemented are likely to succeed. Most traditional New Year’s resolutions seek to maximise the effect of their change, without taking into account its probability of succeeding. If we instead seek to maximise the expected outcome of the change, we can look at maximising the probability of success. In loose Bayesian terms we might write: P(success) = P(succcess | implementation) * P(implementation) The series was conceived when screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who had seen a 15th-century artwork illustrating the Commandments in scenes from that time period, suggested the idea of a modern equivalent. Filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski was interested in the philosophical challenge, and also wanted to use the series as a portrait of the hardships of Polish society, while deliberately avoiding the political issues he had depicted in earlier films. He originally meant to hire ten different directors, but decided to direct the films himself. He used a different cinematographer for each episode except III and IX, in both of which Piotr Sobociński was director of photography. [10] According to online film resource They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Dekalog is the 2nd most acclaimed film of 1989. [26] Longer feature films [ edit ] Exploring the nuances of Poland's society and culture, Dekalog: One offers a narrative that is both engaging and thought-provoking. Whether you're a native speaker looking to revisit the classics of your homeland or a student of the language and culture seeking a deeper understanding, this film presents an opportunity to do so through the compelling medium of cinema.
At the end you see that the Commandments work not like science but like art; they are instructions for how to paint a worthy portrait with our lives. Dekalog: One ( Polish: Dekalog, jeden) is the first part of Dekalog, the drama series of films directed by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski for television, possibly connected to the first and second imperatives of the Ten Commandments: "I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me" and "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." At the end of A Short Film About Love, the image deepens in hope when Tomek materializes within a shared dream. It is as if the long lens has been a probe taking a geological sample whose unseen layers one inspects. Deepening space may deepen awareness to the point of turning spectators into that other spectator, the young man. The transformation may follow from a fusion of the material and the metaphysical of the kind exemplified by the end of Dekalog: One. The image of the Madonna confronting the newly bereaved Krzysztof may be a close-up of a face, but it is simultaneously distanced from him by its frozen quality, its status as art, and its reminder of Paweł’s unseen mother, in another country—not to mention Krzysztof’s look downward and away from it. That interpenetration of the immediate and the beyond ramifies into the recurrence of animals in this film, and Paweł’s empathy with them: his fascination by pigeons at his window, his grief over the dead dog with the yellow eyes, his interest in a schoolmate’s hamster. Some reflections by C. S. Lewis are surely relevant: “How strange that God brings us into such intimate relations with creatures of whose real purpose and destiny we remain forever ignorant. We know to some degree what angels and men are for. But what is a flea for, or a wild dog?” It is as if Paweł’s intense closeness to the animal world—to that dead wild dog, and the fleas that doubtless burrowed through its fur—brings him closer to another world, into which he then falls so easily. Humility” may not seem like the most natural word to associate with a man who tended to think in trilogies, a storyteller who wouldn’t get out of bed to make a movie that didn’t look to poke holes in the very fabric of the universe, but Kieślowski was only so good at asking the impossible questions because he never attempted to answer them.
Dekalog: One
In the hands of a weaker director and writer — Krzysztof Piesiewicz co-wrote the series — each commandment may have been taken more literally. My naïve expectation when I first approached the series was that it each episode’s commandment would be obvious. I couldn’t name all ten commandments before watching the series, and the dilemmas of each film often overlapped several commandments. Importantly neither writer imposed their own views onto the characters: the audience is left free to judge the characters, their actions, and their decisions themselves. What might we do in the same situation? Would we ever get into that situation? How would we resolve it? A nameless character played by Polish actor Artur Barciś appears in all but episodes 7 and 10. He observes the main characters at key moments, and never intervenes. Thomas Piketty’s work on income inequality is much cited and discussed; he is considered one of the most influential living economists. I’ve seen his name crop up a lot recently, especially in articles about the economy after coronavirus. However, there’s just one problem: journalists can’t seem to resist mentioning that he’s the “ French economist Thomas Piketty”.
I finish at Slovakia. For obvious-in-retrospect reasons it shares a building with the Czech Republic. Dreams was the first film written solely by Kurosawa and constitutes a recounting of the director’s memories, nightmares, dreams and fears, told through a cinematic lens. Dekalog: One" stands as a testament to the transformative power of cinema, exploring themes rarely touched upon with such delicacy and depth. It has been celebrated at various film festivals, marking its place in the pantheon of cinematic masterpieces, and becoming a beacon for filmmakers and enthusiasts drawn to the essence of Eastern European cinema. Conclusion I am the Lord thy God... thou shalt not have other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
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And yet, for a biblically-scaled film cycle so rich with irony that it seems to be chipping off the walls of the brutalist apartment complex where most of it takes place, perhaps the greatest irony of them all is that “Dekalog” is ultimately defined by its humility. Lithuania is on Vauxhaul Bridge Road. Not counting my warm-up jog I’ve already covered 10km but I’ve not even covered half the embassies. The road is the busiest yet and the pollution is getting to me. One of my friends had an iPhone. This was unusual at the time; iPhones had only been available in the UK for a little over 4 years, so by early 2012 hand-me-downs were still uncommon, let alone brand new devices. As we chatted, he showed me an iPhone app for creating custom “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters.
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