Dekalog

The scheme compels ten films, and the subtractive test, put to the cycle, finds each required. Without I the cycle loses its argument against the idol of calculation; without X it ends in tragedy rather than laughter. Inside the films there is little fat: V gives its murder and its hanging equal, unbearable duration, because each requires the other. Three things give. The mapping of films to commandments is loose — III could stand under adultery as easily as under the Sabbath, and VI is about watching more than adultery — so part of the necessity is given by the number rather than the argument. III’s night search repeats its stations beyond need, and IV turns on a reversal that is a device more than a necessity.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a moral law is not applied to a case; it is broken open by one, in which keeping it is not the same as doing right. II is the clearest: the consultant swears falsely by the precept’s own standard, and the lie saves a child. V sets the state’s killing beside the private one, the same act made slower, cleaner and planned, so that the second cannot be seen as a correction of the first. VIII brings into the open, in Poland in 1988, a Catholic refusal to shelter a Jewish child in 1943. Held down because several films disclose a mood of loneliness more than a meaning, and the public world of 1988 is left out by design.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The register is low and close, so frequency is counted against restraint. In I the boy asks about death beside a dead dog in the snow; later his father overturns an altar, and candle wax runs down the face of the Black Madonna like tears. V is the cycle’s terror: a murder long, clumsy and physical, with rope and stone, and a hanging staged as procedure, with officials, forms and a trap. In II a bee climbing out of a glass of syrup carries the film’s turn. IX ends with a bicycle ridden off an unfinished viaduct. Against these, III, IV and X stay at the level of chamber drama, and the beauty is often austere rather than elevating. Height reaches the top only in I and V.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth built at the level of the cycle. The Decalogue is laid over one housing estate, so the law of Sinai governs a single courtyard of ordinary tenants. The silent watcher is load-bearing: he sees and does not intervene, at the edge of the frame, and the cycle never says whether he is an angel, a witness or a conscience. I is Abraham and Isaac inverted, a father who offers his son to the god of calculation and is given no ram. VII is the judgment of Solomon with no Solomon: two women claim one child. The particular stays particular, down to queues, lifts and broken heating. Held down because, below the cycle, III, IV and X carry their archetype lightly, and the commandment over each film is often evoked rather than built.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the Polish cinema of moral anxiety of the late 1970s, which Kieślowski had helped to make, and state television drama. The departure is a turn away from the political, in 1988, the year of the last strikes, toward metaphysics and private ethics, on a commandment scheme, inside a state broadcaster. The whole was conceived as one structure, and two of its films were made again as features. The stake was real: the cycle could be read as evasion at home, or as piety under a communist broadcaster. Held at the threshold by precedent: Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (1962–72) had already built a cycle of films under a moral rubric, and Bergman and Fassbinder had already made auteur work for television.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows: one law, many cases, one shared world. Ten films of close to an hour, each closed on itself, under a number rather than a named precept, make the viewer find the commandment in the case instead of reading the case under it. One estate and crossing tenants make the cases a society: the seminar in VIII sets the case of II as a problem, so the cycle reads itself, and the clerk of VI appears in X’s post office. As one long film it would lose the closure of each case; as a serial with continuing characters, the discreteness the precepts require. The cost is the loose mapping: where the commandments could be reshuffled, the form is in part a frame.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise, across nearly four decades. The cycle is taught in ethics as well as in film, and its cases are argued as cases. The films yield on return: the watcher’s appearances, the precept behind each number, the crossing tenants, the colour filters of V, and the question of who the neighbour is in X. A first viewing does not exhaust them, and the readings the cycle has drawn — Christian, agnostic, existentialist — disagree on fundamentals, the mark of a work not yet used up. Held down by elapsed time: four decades is evidence, but not the evidence of centuries, and the cycle’s readers are a smaller, more specialist field than the oldest works on the desk command.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real. The cycle reorganised what television could carry in one structure — ten serious, closed films under one metaphysical scheme — and showed that a moral argument could be built across a cycle rather than inside a single film. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is reach, which runs narrower than the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle made Kieślowski’s international career; The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colours trilogy inherit its method of chance, crossing lives and a governing abstraction; the published screenplays carry a foreword by Stanley Kubrick. Its reach into later multi-strand film is plausible but not shown, and it did not, in any way that can be shown, redirect television.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over nearly four decades. The cycle has outlived the state that broadcast it, the estate’s economy of shortage, and the home computer of 1988 on which I turns. The surface fixed to its moment is large: lifts that fail, queues, the post office, money orders, the drab light of late socialism. That surface now reads as historical rather than topical, and the precepts do not date. The cycle is taught, and it is still argued over. What holds it at the threshold is elapsed time, as for every work of its period, and a cost particular to this one: a television look in some films, with a smaller frame, that makes it age faster than the features made from two of them.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of film made for television, and the making bears weight. The camera changes hands across the cycle, so each film has its own look: V is filtered green, its corners darkened, over a city that looks poisoned; IX keeps to cool interiors. One composer holds the looks together, and Preisner’s music is sparse and returns. The direction of actors is the cycle’s strongest craft: Bardini’s consultant, Janda’s Dorota, Gajos’s father in IV, Baka’s Jacek, Szapołowska’s Magda, and Stuhr and Zamachowski as comic brothers. Objects are cut to carry argument: the ink bottle that cracks in I, the bee in II, the spilt milk in VI, the frame in VIII that will not hang straight. The costs: III’s middle sags, IV relies on dialogue, and some images show the limits of television production.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: I, a child’s death under the ice, and X, a black comedy about stamps and a kidney. One law governs both. A desire placed in the wrong object — calculation in I, the collection in X — takes a body from its owner, and chance completes the cost. X ends with the brothers laughing over the same stamps, the inheritance accepted as a joke rather than a curse. The law also holds across the films’ different looks: V’s filters and IX’s cool interiors are both governed by the block, the watcher and Preisner’s music. The strain is the commandment scheme, a law declared at the top and loosely kept below. Ten precepts kept as themes rather than as rules hold this axis a step below the form.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Many orders are held in one estate. Consciousness: Roman’s jealousy, Tomek’s watching, Zofia’s guilt. The family: parents and children in I, IV and VII, marriage in II and IX, brothers in X. Labour: the consultant, the taxi drivers, the lawyer, the post-office clerk, the surgeon, the professor. The state: the court, the prison and the gallows in V. History: the occupation in VIII, and the consultant’s family lost to the war in II. The sacred: the altar and the icon in I, and the watcher. The natural order: ice, illness, impotence, a kidney. They are integrated, not listed: one courtyard holds them. The absences are the public world — the Party, the Church as institution, the workplace beyond the office door, and politics — excluded by design, and recorded here.

Score: 8.6 / 10