Kieslowski's Decalogue

Written and produced under martial law in 1980s Communist Poland, Krzysztof Kielowskis Decalogue presents a collective portrait of a demoralized nation populated by gloomy individualists" who respond to other people with antagonism or indifference. Feeling betrayed by a history of brutal invasions, the series characters struggle to cast off a legacy of a bitterness that has arisen because their national hopes have been so frequently shattered. Yet the central questions that animate The Decalogue are not political but ethical and ontological: How should one live? And why should one live at all in an atomized civilization? In exploring these questions in relation to the Ten Commandments, the series unifying principle is, paradoxically, disintegration: Kielowskis protagonists break the Commandments in a fractured world drained of meaning. Disintegration functions as a multidimensional principlemoral, historical, social, and psychologicalinforming The Decalogues conception, organization, and style. In analyzing these features the study draws on a wide range of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic inter-texts.