The Decalogue

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The Decalogue

Directed by	Krzysztof Kieślowski
Produced by	Ryszard Chutkowski
Written by	Krzysztof Kieślowski Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Starring	Miroslaw Baka Henryk Baranowski Artur Barcis Aleksander Bardini Janusz Gajos
Release date(s)	December 10, 1989
Running time	55 min (10 episodes)
Language	Polish
IMDb profile

Dekalog (The Decalogue) (1988) is a Polish film series, originally made as a television miniseries, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and co-written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. It consists of ten one-hour films, each of which represents one of the Ten Commandments and explores possible meanings of the commandment—often ambiguous or contradictory—within a fictional story set in modern Poland. The series is Kieślowski's most acclaimed work and has won numerous international awards, though it was not widely released outside Europe until the late 1990s. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick described it as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime.

Though each film is independent, most of them share the same setting (a large housing project in Warsaw) and some of the characters are acquainted with each other. There is also a nameless character (Artur Barciś), possibly supernatural, who observes the main characters at key moments but never intervenes. The large cast includes both famous actors and unknowns, many of whom Kieślowski also used in other films. Typically for Kieślowski, the tone of most of the films is meditative and melancholy, except for the last one, which (like Three Colors: White, which features two of the same actors) is a black comedy.

The series was conceived when Piesiewicz, who had seen a 15th-century artwork illustrating the commandments in scenes from that time period, suggested the idea of a modern equivalent. Kieślowski, though an agnostic, 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, though using a different cinematographer for each.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The ten films are titled simply by number (e.g. Decalogue: One). In English, they are sometimes referred to by the commonly used short forms of the commandments based on the King James Bible text, as follows. Kieślowski said that the films did not correspond exactly to the commandments, and never used their names himself. However, they appear to follow with the Roman Catholic enumeration of the commandments more than any others. On the Jewish numbering, the first statement is only I am the Lord your God (interpreted as a commandment to believe in God); but in the first film, the computer is widely regarded as symbolizing a false god, which is the second commandment in Jewish. On Jewish and many Protestant numberings, there is only one commandment about Covetousness; on the Catholic reading, there are two, and the ninth film, about a husband's mistrust of his wife, seems to involve this:

One: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. A university professor (Henryk Baranowski) trains his young son in the use of reason and the scientific method, but is confronted with the unpredictability of fate.
Two: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. A young woman (Krystyna Janda) asks her husband's doctor (Aleksander Bardini) to make a medical pronouncement with impossible certainty.
Three: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. A family man (Daniel Olbrychski) abandons his family duties on Christmas Eve to deal with a former lover in a crisis (Maria Pakulnis).
Four: Honour thy father and thy mother. Uncertainty about her real parentage complicates the bond between a young woman (Adrianna Biedrzyńska) and her father (Janusz Gajos).
Five: Thou shalt not kill. A brutal and seemingly motiveless murder brings together a drifter (Mirosław Baka), a cruel taxi driver (Jan Tesarz), and an idealistic lawyer (Krzysztof Globisz). This is the only one of the films with an explicit political stance, reflecting Kieślowski's opposition to the death penalty.
Six: Thou shalt not commit adultery. A naive young man (Olaf Lubaszenko) spies on a stranger (Grażyna Szapołowska) through her window and falls in love with her.
Seven: Thou shalt not steal. A young woman (Anna Polony) abducts her own child, who has been raised by her parents as her sister.
Eight: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. A Holocaust survivor (Teresa Marczewska) confronts an ethics professor (Maria Kościałowska) who once refused to help her. The story was based on an experience of the filmmakers' mutual friend, the journalist Hanna Krall.
Nine: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife. A man who has become impotent (Piotr Machalica) discovers that his wife (Ewa Błaszczyk) has a lover. (A minor character in this film, a young singer with a heart condition, inspired Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's next film, The Double Life of Véronique.)
Ten: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods. Two brothers (Jerzy Stuhr, Zbigniew Zamachowski) inherit a valuable stamp collection and become obsessed with completing it.

(This list follows Catholic and Lutheran tradition; most other Christian sects and Judaism divide the commandments differently, listing the prohibition against "graven images" as the second, and combining the ninth and tenth into one [1]. Poland is predominantly Catholic.)

Kieślowski expanded Five and Six into longer feature films, Krótki film o zabijaniu (A Short Film About Killing) and Krótki film o miłości (A Short Film About Love), using the same cast and changing the stories slightly. This was part of a contractual obligation with the producers, since feature films were easier to distribute outside Poland.