I notice that a strange movement persists among people

 Sunday: I’ve arranged a meeting with friends in front of a good hotel in Paris. I am waiting, [it is] morning. The biggest, newest black BMW with an Italian license plate arrives. Inside—an elegant, greyish man. He leans over smiling: are you Italian? I answer with a negative nod of the head and see that I’ve really upset him. I feel sorry, but at the same time, glad: he’s taken me for an Italian! French? He continues to ask and gets worried that I’m not even French. He switches to English, and because he speaks that language worse than me, I have a nice, and nasty, sense of advantage. A tourist? I confirm it. He tells me a story: he is a fashion designer and today he has just finished his show in Paris. He shows folders. Nice. During the closing, his wallet was stolen with money, credit cards; fortunately he kept his passport separately; he also shows his Italian passport. He thought I was a compatriot, and now.… And again a worried, doggy, congenial face. I ask what it’s about. About money; he has to have some money to get back to Rome, to stay overnight somewhere on the way, to eat something. How much? A lot. More or less as much as what I have. He apologizes that he’s intruded, and I feel so good! I am in a way proud that he’s addressed me for help, that he’s chosen me. I take my wallet out. He gives me his business card, he will pay me the money back and we’ll drink wine in Rome, whenever I come there! And he takes out a huge, plastic bag. This is a present for you. Inside: a few leather jackets, these are his designs, whatever is left from the show. I don’t want the jackets, I don’t look at them, but he definitely has to give me a present. If I don’t take [it], he will be offended and he already wants to give me the money back. This is worth a lot more, more than a thousand dollars, he says; it’s only a present for you being so good! I feel even better. He pushes the bag on me, and leaves. For the whole day I don’t have time, but in the evening I open the bag. The jackets are made of hideous, tawdry artificial leather. Still trustingly, I check his business card: the street in which he lives does not even exist in Rome! I hang the jacket up on a hanger, the seam comes apart.

Tuesday: Bad news this morning. A few months ago, my friend’s mother was murdered.1 He found her in [her] apartment tied up with a very crafty knot; she was dead. My friend is a lawyer. He acted in the trial of the priest Popiełuszko’s murderers, milicja officers [trans: “milicja” is the name for the police of the People’s Republic; in post-communist Poland “milicja” became “policja”].2 He was these officers’ private prosecutor. That’s precisely the knot they used to tie the priest before they drowned him. Yesterday, he had his car broken into. A few days ago, his apartment. Dangerous. 

*

Thursday: Morning, 6 am at the airport in America in Los Angeles. A taxi-driver already warns me, seeing numerous people in front of the airport building: a bomb. Indeed, there have been phone calls, they’ve planted a bomb. The police are throwing everyone out: travellers and staff, even chefs from the airport restaurant. Probably two thousand people. Hot. There is nowhere to go, there is only a building surrounded by the police, and the highway on which they’ve stopped traffic. We crowd up in bedlam; it’s getting hotter. Everything that should be happening is: children are crying, somebody is singing, someone is fainting in the squeeze, and so on. But after an hour, I notice that a strange movement persists among people, or more like a displacement, squeezing through with bundles, step by step. At first it’s difficult to understand it, and then it becomes clear. After an hour of that movement the crowd has divided itself: Whites separate, Blacks separate, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians separate, Mexicans separate. Everyone is standing in harmony, crowded together, but now segregated. Nobody could have planned that, but that’s how it’s happened. I wonder if I have also moved. Yes. I’ve moved two meters, because next to me a Mexican child’s been screaming. I have moved towards people speaking French; they are probably from Europe.

*

Thursday: Really, why did I think about censorship yesterday? It’s the two conversations I’ve had in the last few days with the most prominent Polish directors, those who also work domestically. Wajda heavily involved himself in politics for at least two years; he’s been a Senator for a year. I’ve never hidden that I consider it absurd wasting such talent as Wajda’s on politics. He says that he wants to do something for Poland, for the new Poland. I’ve told him that the only truly good thing that he can do is a good film, because he knows how. Recently, he’s announced that he won’t be running in the next election. I met him, he was sad. What will I be doing? he asked. Films, I answered. What about? He looked at me in such a way that I understood he really didn’t know. Two days ago, I met Zanussi. He’d finished shooting. When asked how it went, he shook his head in displeasure. I’ve shot something similar to what Wajda did a few days ago. Do you know what they want? Who? I asked. He pointed with his head there, outside. They, people.

Thursday: It has occurred to me that since I’ve mentioned censorship, it would be good to say how it used to work. I’ve had, just like my colleagues, a heap of adventures with censorship. Some of my films were not screened for years, others never. Frequently, I cut something out thinking that the change was not destroying the film; frequently, I refused. In 1976 I made the feature film The Calm for television. I liked that film, it had a few good scenes, and a thought—that a man couldn’t achieve peace even if it meant only home, wife, television—was near to me. The protagonist is a guy who comes out of prison. Once free, he works at a small building site. They bring prisoners there to help. Television objected to that scene. The [television] vice-president was a very intelligent and cunning man. He called me into his office. I knew why. When I approached the building, I noticed that prisoners were working on the railway tracks. They were dressed normally, in prison clothes, around them guards with rifles. I entered the vice-president’s office. He said he liked The Calm a lot and voiced a truly astute review of that film. Really, he understood everything. He truly liked the film. I was nicely tickled and waited for what was to follow; I knew I hadn’t been called in to listen to compliments. Of course. The vice-president with regret informed me that he had to demand the deletion of a few scenes from the film. He believed it would not hurt. On the contrary, the film would be more nimble. Among the scenes for deletion he included also the one with the building site with prisoners. I asked why there could be no scene in which prisoners work on a building site. Because in Poland, said the vice-president, prisoners don’t work outside prison. The convention forbids it.… He mentioned the name of an international convention. I asked him to come to the window. He did. I asked him what he saw. He said, tramway tracks. And on the tracks? Who is working there? He looked more closely. Prisoners, he said calmly, they’re here every day. So, prisoners in Poland work outside prison, I noted. Of course, he said, that’s why you have to delete that scene.

That’s more or less what those conversations looked like. That one was quite pleasant. I deleted the scene with prisoners and a few more, and the film still would not be shown for four years. When it was shown, it had already become a historical film. In Poland a lot changes fast.

Tuesday: Fourteen years have passed since the conversation with the vice-president. Yesterday I passed through a small town. I slowed down, because the road was being repaved. Like in a bad script, those who were repaving were dressed in prison clothes. Guards with rifles stood next to them. Today I can make a film about it. That’s it on censorship, which doesn’t exist anymore. And also on how much and how fast things change.

*

Krzysztof Kieślowski: Interviews

The Decalogue - Kieślowski

 

 Ten commandments, ten films. Krzysztof Kieslowski sat for months in his small, smoke-filled room in Warsaw writing the scripts with a lawyer he’d met in the early 1980s, during the Solidarity trials. Krzysztof Piesiewicz didn’t know how to write, the director remembered, but he could talk. For hours they talked about Poland in turmoil, and together they wrote the screenplay for No End (1985), which told three stories of life under martial law. The government found it unsympathetic, the opposition found it compromised, and the Catholic Church found it immoral. During the controversy, the collaborators ran into each other in the rain, and Piesiewicz, maybe looking for more trouble, shouted, “Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments.” 

 They made ten films, each an hour long, for Polish television. The series ran in the late 1980s, played at the Venice and other film festivals, and gathered extraordinary praise. But the form was ungainly for theatrical showing (do you ask audiences to sit for ten hours, or come for five two-hour sessions?), and The Decalogue never had an ordinary U.S. theatrical run, nor was it available here on video. In 2000, at last, it was released in North America on tapes and DVD. 

 I taught a class on The Decalogue a few years ago, using tapes from England, and found we lost a lot of time trying to match up the films and the Commandments. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation; some films touch on more than one commandment, and others involve the whole ethical system suggested by the Commandments. These are not simplistic illustrations of the rules, but stories that involve real people in the complexities of real problems. 

 

 All the stories involve characters who live in the same high-rise Warsaw apartment complex. We grow familiar with the layout and even glimpse characters from one story in the backgrounds of others—sharing the lift, for example. There is a young man who appears in eight of them, a solemn onlooker who never says anything but sometimes makes sad eye contact. I thought perhaps he represented Christ, but Kieslowski, in an essay about the series, says, “I don’t know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches us, our lives. He’s not very pleased with us.” Directors are notorious for not pinning down the meanings of their images. I like the theory of Annette Insdorf, in her valuable book about Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances; she compares the watcher to the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), who are “pure gaze”—able to “record human folly and suffering but unable to alter the course of the lives they witness.” 

 The ten films are not philosophical abstractions, but personal stories that involve us immediately; I hardly stirred during some of them. 

 After seeing the series, Stanley Kubrick observed that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz “have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them.” Quite so. There is not a moment when the characters talk about specific commandments or moral issues. Instead, they are absorbed in trying to deal with real-life ethical challenges. 

 Consider the heroine of Decalogue: Two, who wants a doctor to tell her whether her sick husband will live or die. The doctor, a gruff and solitary being, is almost cruelly distant with her; he resists being asked to play God. The woman explains why she must know: She is pregnant with another man’s child. Her husband is not fertile. If he is going to live, she will have an abortion. If he is going to die, she will have the baby. 

 The stuff of soap opera. But here it becomes a moral puzzle, solved finally only through a flashback to the doctor’s own painful past—and even then the solution is indirect, since events do not turn out as anyone anticipates. Kieslowski roots the issues in very specific performances by the doctor and the woman (Aleksander Bardini and Krystyna Janda), and a beautiful, subtle thing happens: The film is about their separate moral challenges, and not about the two of them locked together by one problem. 

 Or look at the moral switch in Decalogue: Six, which is about a lonely teenage boy who uses a telescope to spy on the sex life of a morally careless, lonely woman who lives across the way. He decides he loves her. They see each other because he is a clerk in the post office. He takes a morning milk route so he can see her then too. Almost inevitably, she finds out he is a Peeping Tom (and also an anonymous phone caller and a prankster), but we can hardly anticipate what she does then. 

 In one of the sharp but plausible dramatic twists that Kieslowski likes in all of his films, the woman invites the teenager to her apartment and uses his sexual inexperience to humiliate him. And that is still only the halfway point in their moral duel; what happens next, to him, to her, to them, shows right and wrong shifting back and forth between them as sinner and victim exchange roles. Their relationship shows “situational ethics” becoming fluid and confusing. 

 Kieslowski deliberately avoided everyday facts of life in Poland, because he thought they were a distraction—the rules, the laws, the shortages, the bureaucracy. He deals with those parts of life that are universal. In Decalogue: One, for me the saddest of all his stories, he tells about the love between a smart father and a genius son. Together they use computers to calculate the freezing rate of a nearby pond so they will know when the ice is thick enough to skate safely. But ponds and currents cannot always be studied so simply, and perhaps the computer is a false god. 

 None of these films are simple demonstrations of black and white moral issues. Decalogue: Five is about a murderer who seems completely amoral. To understand him is not to forgive him. But the story also focuses on his defense attorney, a young man trying his first case and passionately opposed to the death penalty. Decalogue: Nine is about a man who discovers his wife is having an affair. He hides himself to spy on them and eavesdrops as she breaks up forever with her lover—and then she discovers her husband in hiding. She did the wrong thing (adultery) and the right one (ending it); his spying was a violation of her trust—and then there is an outcome where pure chance almost leads to a death, which was avoidable if either had been more honest. 

 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. 

 Kieslowski (1941–96) and Piesiewicz wrote the screenplays intending that each would be filmed by a different director. But Kieslowski was unwilling to give them up, and he directed all ten, each one with a different cinematographer so that the visual styles would not become repetitious. The settings are much the same: gray exteriors, in winter for the most part, small apartments, offices. The faces are where the life of the films resides. 

 These are not characters involved in the simpleminded struggles of Hollywood plots. They are adults, for the most part outside organized religion, faced with situations in their own lives that require them to make moral choices. You shouldn’t watch the films all in one sitting, but one at a time. Then if you are lucky and have someone to talk with, you discuss them and learn about yourself. Or if you are alone, you discuss them with yourself, as so many of Kieslowski’s characters do.

THE GREAT MOVIES

 Roger Ebert