Krzysztof Kieslowski
Decalogo, I

The first chapter in a series of ten short films shot in 1988 and presented the following year in Venice, "Decalogue 1" is a grand fresco, majestic in its tones yet humble in images, of a common story that is therefore eternal.

Young Pavel lives with his father in the Polish suburbs at the end of the '80s; his days pass between playing with friends and spending time with his paternal aunt. His life is serene and simple, but not that of the world around him, which seems to teem with misfortunes and an underlying gloom worthy of Greek theater. His father teaches at the university and is a man of science in the broadest yet poorest sense of the term; he believes that everything can be measured, weighed, and classified by man, with the help of his trusty computer. Opposite him stands the boy's aunt, a devout Catholic convinced of divine goodness. Little Pavel, caught between these two forces, continues his inner maturation, until the day his father helps him determine whether or not he can skate on the frozen pond behind their house. The answer offered by the computer's calculations is positive, and the boy goes to the pond the next day. The film closes with the father's defeat and a tragedy already foretold.

Complex and profound, Kieslowski's writing does not allow for easy interpretations, nor straightforward answers; it is therefore unlikely and misleading to present the film as an attempt to show how distancing from religion can lead to disastrous consequences. In my opinion, it is not even an attempt by the director to stigmatize the conception that contemporaries had of Science, or their civilization of crisis produced by faith in Science and Reason.

It is true that a gloomy and heavy atmosphere pervades the film from the very beginning, also due to the settings of the dreariest suburbs, where faceless human figures wander among the skeletons of semi-abandoned buildings: but this climate is not so much the result of an era of global crisis due to the lack of Christian values, but rather the ideal background the director wants to lend to his representation, in some ways comparable to the atmosphere of tragic theater.

Kieslowski shares with tragic theater some expressive modes, especially the technique of climax; the path that leads the father to the awareness of his son's death is long, marked by fixed stages reminiscent of Oedipus's similar inner journey. The viewer, as unaware as the father of the events that have occurred, is led to immediately think the worst: an ink bottle spills over the professor's papers, then onto the desk, and then flows like a river onto his hands, staining them as with a "literary blood," the only kind that could touch such an individual. But the father is not a shallow man; he is sincerely attached to his son, while the deeply Catholic aunt does not provide the existential answers that little Pavel desires. In a writing play that's always complex, Good and Evil in Kieslowski's world are not in competition, they are not neatly separated to reassure the fragile hearts of mediocre people.

I believe the film's message lies in considering the relevant commandment "You shall have no other gods before me" from a less ecclesiastical and more universal angle. The Science to which the father is devoted is not the true science: he has two computers, one he uses for calculations, black, and the other, white, which he never turns on, and which he himself fears. At times this second white computer turns on by itself and attempts a dialogue, writing "I am ready" on the screen. But the father is not a sincere worshiper of his god and prefers the lesser science of the black computer, which will mislead him, causing his son's death.

That the God to serve is not the biblical one is shown by the aunt's story, a Catholic also destroyed by the senseless death of her nephew. It thus seems (at least to me) clearer how the film's message is an invitation to surrender with genuine passion to the "divinity, whoever it may be, symbolized by the icon of the Black Madonna weeping at the end of the film or by the white computer, always seeking contact with man. In the film's disconcerting fresco, the author instead presents two human but mediocre figures: a scientist who deep down doesn't believe in his calculations and a believer stuck at the surface of faith.