Dekalog, osiem

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.

"Simuland" him/herself bears false witness by spreading ignorance!: "What Polish underground? That must have been a really exclusive minority. There was no organized effort by any Polish underground to save Jews; whatever Jews happened to be rescued were done so by individuals acting on their own. To claim otherwise, as K. does, is to lie." FACT: Poland had the largest--and longest lived--underground in Europe during WWII! It gave France & Britain a copy of the Germans' enigma coding machine, & helped to crack the code. FACT: Future Georgetown University Jan Karski escaped to England to inform a doubting West of the Holocaust(including meetings with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and President Franklin D. Roosevelt). FACT: Zegota (the Council to Aid Jews)was a branch of the Polish underground established to rescue Jews from the Nazis.Its express purpose was to aid the country's Jews and find places of safety for them in occupied Poland. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe with such a dedicated secret organization.

Simuland then continues to spew his bigotry: "Widespread deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism both predated and survived the Nazi invasion; Poles killed Jews even after the Nazi's retreated. To this day they make life insufferable for the scarce Jews who remain in their country. (I have this directly from a Jewish colleague who grew up in and fled modern Communist Poland.)" There was strong animosity on both sides toward each other. This came from centuries of antagonistic living in close quarters (predicated by Poland's unprecedented religious tolerance--which is why 90% of European Jews lived autonomously in pre-partitioned Poland). While some Poles did kill Jews, it is likewise true that some Jews killed Poles. To blame the entire populations for the actions of the few, would be like blaming all Americans for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Many Jews were communists (the 1st. head of the party in post-war Poland, for example), and helped the Soviets to select & deport 2 million Poles to Siberia after Stalin invaded & divided the country with his ally, Hitler, in 1939 (within a year, 1 million of these Poles were dead). The "pogrom" he alludes was political. In the Cold War, Moscow backed the Arabs against the U.S. backed Israel. It directed the Polish Communist Party to rid itself of its Jewish faction. The non-Jewish & Jewish factions of the party were bitter rivals.

With a minimum of histrionics, this film tells a simple story about the legacy of the holocaust in Poland.

A college professor who once turned away a little Jewish girl who sought refuge is confronted by that same girl -- now in her forties -- and must explain to her the real reason for turning her away. While the two women are able to forge a deep friendship, the man (a tailor) who risked his life to try and save the girl has become, with time, too closed off to allow her to form any sort of bond with him. The film's last image, of the lonely tailor looking out the window of his shop to see the professor and her friend laughing together, has the same straight forward and unassuming emotional wallop that ends many of Kieslowski's films.

This may be the best fictional film ever made about the holocaust.

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.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness" is the commandment in question being addressed by director Kieslowski. The anti-Jewish sentiment is merely a vehicle to study the Christian commandment threadbare. Is the concept of Christian charity second to a commandment? The film is ambiguous about the director/writer's view on this yet we suspect the director is not taking a clear stand. He does take a stand on the God within each of us--the goodness, the humane aspect of each of us is the last word.

This film is one of the few in which we seem to get a peek at the real Kieslowski. The initial parts of the film keep religion out of focus and in the background. The church/shrine at Leobowski is initially never shown in focus--you only see the lighted candles before an altar/shrine. Later in the film the Jewish girl is seen praying at the Christian site (an act confirmed later in the film through the dialogue).

The film begins with reproach of one wronged at age 6 by a "religious" Catholic who refuses to be charitable out of fear of repercussions, hiding behind the Commandment. The film ends with the main characters coming closer in a new bonding through understanding through re-evaluation of new facts and a theological reconciliation. Momentarily, even the viewer is made to suspect the Catholic woman's credibility as she presents her case to the grown-up "child". But the "wronged" child undergoes a transformation--she begins to like the woman who did not bear witness, a lonely woman whose son has left her, a remorseful woman teaching ethics.

The brilliant culmination of the film is the final presentation of the tailor's character--the man, a Christian, who was ready to save a Jewish child--who knowing everything refuses to discuss the past, present and future--a man who has evidently faced a lot of torment. He watches dispassionately the bonding between the two women as the film ends.

The elder woman anticipates the reaction of the tailor and waits outside the shop. The woman who straightens the stubborn painting that refuses to align, the woman who has lost her biological son in society, gains the understanding of the child she wronged. The goodness in man comes out in this episode of Dekalog, sometimes silently (the tailor), sometimes evocatively (the Jewish girl who prays alone after reconciling with religions and finding a different woman in the person she thought was different and inhuman).

The camera-work is not as good as in Dekalog 7, but the all performances and the minimalist music are just stunning.

However, there are questions left unanswered. What was the interruption in the classroom all about? Why was the opening scene of the child of 6 being led by an adult necessary? Why did the tailor not talk after recognizing her? Are there political metaphors here? I had the good fortune of meeting the Director 8 years before he made this film. How I wish I had met him now!