Dekalog, osiem

Everyone, and I mean everyone who is alive, should spend some time with Kieslowski. And to do it right, you need to spend time with these ten experiments.

Yes, they are experiments and they are important to the history of cinematic imagination.

They are all cowritten. The writing partner sets a knot, a dramatic tangle. Kieslowski then enters this scribble and adds cinematic reality in two ways. The first is simply the cinematic platform of storytelling. The second are a set of cinematic elaborations. Its this second bit that makes him so exciting.

They're what I call cinematic folds, but because this is the short form (the movie equivalent of short stories) they only have to be suggested. Taken together, the collection of ten short films is a few hundred loose fishooks, many of which catch you unawares.

In his "colors" work he folds these back in his long form experiments.

To make this a real experience for us and him, he does most of his work after the project begins filming. And to up the ante, for each of these ten he uses a different creative crew. So you would expect some of these ten to be more adventurous and successful than others.

This is the case. This is the least successful of them so far.

The value, at least to me, in these is how much Kieslowski there is compared to Piesiewicz. The more of Kieslowski's visual improvisation, the better. This has very little. Blunt viewers will still enjoy the story, which is interesting as such things go. But there's little of the master here. Must have been a time of rest.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This is not a particularly remarkable Dekalog. But it's simple and lays out as clearly as any of them the blueprint that Kieslowski worked towards, both in these 10 Dekalogs, the longer short films, and it remains to be seen I guess if he perfects and evolves this for the color trilogy.

The twofold blueprint is that we have a world and a story that takes place. The world across the 10 Dekalogs is the same few months in the life of an apartment block, ostensibly the same few months the show aired. Here for example we have the story of Dekalog 2 with the dying husband laid through as something that happened in the same neighborhood.

Anyway this world is open-ended and ebbs forward and back with what the protagonists have set in motion around them. The most interesting thing about Dekalog is Kieslowski's ability, snippets of it in TV form, to render that visually as movements in emotional air.

The story each time focuses on a moral issue, here it's guilt, tied to the Polish experience of WWII and how it reverberates still. But time and again the story is reduced to two characters forlornly baring themselves to each other in a room, explaining or avoiding to. Bergman.

Here we have it clearly: the notion (during a class on ethics) of stories where readers (viewers) have to surmise the motivation of characters.

One of these viewers inside the class begins narrating her own story that begs for ethical interpretation: a Jewish girl in need of shelter from Nazi horror who was turned away from a Catholic Polish home.

Kieslowski attempts to visually inhabit a corner of this story (no more is allowed by the TV format): the old woman returns to the same WWII home where the story took place, the girl is lost and she looks for her distraught. She was the protagonist in that story, now inhabiting the memory of it.

Then we are back in a room where we have a deeper story that explains the former, giving us a plausible ethics that explain what seemed like wrongdoing at the time. This is the same Dekalog effort of setting up a story that they try to deepen later on with more complicated morals.

The idea is that we leave these Dekalogs with some insight into the destructiveness of what it means to inhabit a story (the Jewish girl carried that story of wrongdoing with her for 40 years) as well as some measure of realization about the complexity of inter-dependence forces at work behind the stories.

But this is too clear, a template on how to write rather than a poem.

'Dekalog' is a towering achievement and a televisual masterpiece that puts many feature films to shame, also pulling off a concept of great ambition brilliantly. Although a big admirer of Krzysztof Kieślowski (a gifted director taken from us too early), and who has yet to be disappointed by him, to me 'Dekalog' and 'Three Colours: Red' sees him at his best.

All of 'Dekalog's' episodes have so many great things, and it is an example of none of the lesser episodes being bad. This is testament to the high quality of 'Dekalog' as an overall whole and how brilliant the best episodes are.

Episode 8 may be one of the weaker 'Dekalog' episodes, but it is still very good. With it being the simplest of all ten stories, it is not quite as thematically rich or as emotionally impactful as some of the others, and the other commandments explored with a little more naturalness.

Every single one of 'Dekalog's' episodes are exceptionally well made. The production values in Episode 8 are as ever atmosphere-enhancing, beautiful and haunting to look at and fascinating, definitely cannot be faulted on the technical front. The direction is quietly unobtrusive, intelligently paced and never too heavy, and the music is suitably intricate.

The characters are still interesting and their interactions and relationships with each other resonate. Even though most of the other episodes are richer thematically, Episode 8's themes are still explored intelligently and without any preachiness and there are some very atmospheric and moving moments (just not quite as much as the previous episodes). The acting is superb as to be expected, with complexity and nuances by the bucket-load.

To conclude, may be one of the weaker 'Dekalog' episodes but it is still very good. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Like "Dekalog, jedem", it is one of the most powerful episode of the serie for me. The admirable performance of Maria Koscialkowska, the beautiful work of Teresa Marczewska as Elzbieta , reminding the performance of Krystyna Janda in "Dekalog ,dwa" are the lead virtues. The reference to the dilemma of Dorota Geller is, for same reason, a significant clue. In same measure, it is an episode about Shoah and its shadows, about fear and about resurrection of past price. About a decision and its profound, hidden roots. About the expected word. A special film. For the exploration of the memories of the viewer.

A young Jewish woman, who felt she was wronged as a child, seeks out the elderly woman whom she felt betrayed her. This woman has lived with her decisions most of her life, knowing that what she did was necessary but seemingly cruel. This film is a masterpiece of subtlety and real human feeling. At no time is there rage or overt anger, only an effort to get questions answered. The thing that stands out is the theme that we can't change the past; that time mutes everything. The crooked painting and the contortionist are striking symbols of changes and corrections being hard, if not impossible. I really liked this one.