This essay argues that Kieslowski's Decalogue, despite being produced during the fall of Communism, exemplifies the complex relation to the law that Polish cinema has developed in the post-war years. The relation between film, state, and spectator has forged a cinema that should be understood as tragic in its interpretation of justice as a double bind, rather than simply as an ideological or political cinema.
Dekalog/Decalogue (Kieslowski, 1988) has been called the last of its kind and the first of a new era. Made in 1988, just one year prior to the fall of Communism and one year after the 1987 Film Law abolished state censorship and relinquished state control over film production, the Decalogue no doubt occupies an interesting position politically. Nevertheless, Kieslowski has insisted that the ten films of the Decalogue are not political (Kieslowski 1993: 144). The strangeness of his comment is not its disregard for the truism that nothing escapes the political, but that it comes from one of the reigning masters of post-war Polish film-making and a leader of The Cinema of Moral Concern'. Kieslowski speaks from a context in which film and politics have long been held synonymous. Yet the themes of this series of ten one-hour films based on the biblical commandments are not unfamiliar to Polish cinema. The questions of freedom, authority and the undecideability of the law have been staples of the Polish diet. Kieslowski's refusal of an interpretation of the Decalogue as a metaphor for a political subtext says a lot about the tragic ambitions of this cinema and the difficulty of justice today.
The history of Poland is a history of struggle. Like most nation states Poland emerged amidst conflict and competing forces and sought to establish its identity and to defend its borders. Like other nations it is comprised of ethnic groups who do not share a unified political or cultural persuasion and who pose a threat to the State. Pehaps what is most remarkable about Poland is that it has managed to survive for 1000 years despite having emerged on an open plain, not protected by natural barriers, precisely at the site of collision between the competing Eastern and Western European civilizations.1 As such it has served as the battlefield and concentration camp of Europe. Its national anthem is 'Poland has not yet perished'.
Hegel understood existence to be a dialectical process of opposing forces forging new oppositions, and ultimately moving toward a final synthesis. Tragedy was such an important theme in his work because it was the incarnation of this dialectic. On the stage, two opposing laws come into collision and must be reconciled into a higher synthesis. The contest is not a simple one between good and bad, rather, each law possesses some good and yet each demands univocal allegiance. Such a situation tears the protagonist asunder and makes disaster imminent. To choose one path is to betray the other. For Antigone, for instance, to honour the codes of familial justice over the laws of state justice was to betray the gods with either choice. In Hegel, turmoil emerges only to be overcome, just as the Hegelian metaphysic of historical movement leads towared reconciliation in Absolute Spirit. But myths of history and progress have long been mistrusted in Poland. Here one searches always for the history that exceeds narrative. If collision is the building force of history, Poland understands that what is being erected is the cataclysm itself. We enter here upon a history that cannot easily be told. Such a history demands what Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda calls 'that intangible "something" between sound and picture which is the soul of film' (Wajda 1997: 109)
To speak of the contemporary cinema of Poland is always to be compelled to situate it in relation to war. It is not mere academic protocol that invents the category of post-World War II Polish cinema. Polish cinema is foremost the afterimage of an ineffable violence and destruction. It is a cinema that, like Warsaw, literally rises out of the ashes, forever transformed. In Poland, World War II does not recede into history. It remains fixed in the national conscience as the vortex from which all events, expression, and culture must emanate. It stands not only as trauma, wound or fatality, but also as the locus of complete political and social reorganization. With the assumption of power by the Communists there would emerge an entirely new social order, economic system, ideology and field of restrictions.
The most significant change brought about by the war for Polish cinema was the emergence of an entirely new film industry under state control. Having lost all equipment, cinema halls and most of its film history to the devasation of two world wars, the Polish government sought to create an entirely new industry. Cinema in the Eastern bloc was an extremely important national concern because of its proclivity for serving an ideological or propaganda function. Film Polski was established in 1945, managing every aspect of the industry. With the State financing and distributing the nation's films, it would seem that bureaucracy and state censorship would destroy any attempts at creative expression. And yet, despite this situation, a cinema of intense originality and freedom emerged. Could the figure of the censor have contributed? The role of the censor in Polish cinema is complex because the negotiation between film and law happens on several levels. The situation of post-war Poland permits, and maybe even requires, that the particular become universal, that fact become fiction, and that the word become sound and image.
Film-maker Andrzej Wajda describes two kinds of censorship: the internal and the external. The internal refers to the limitations an artist imposes on himself out of fear. The external is that exercised by regulating bodies in the name of order, control, or morality. For Wajda the true threat to freedom lies in the former, and it is this fear that regulates all censorship. For this reason even Western cinema often refuses to speak about its most delicate or volatile experiences. In this sense there is a gross interiority to all systems, and it is the censor, that body which intervenes between forces, that reinscribes in the appearance of a unified structure - nation, subject, identity - the fact of multiplicity. The self-censoring subject is divided, torn by competing desire.
First we must dispel the simple cold-war myths that contrast the free cinema of the West with the state-controlled cinema of Communism: the former serving an entertainment function, the latter a historical and political function. Every cinema emerges within an economy, a set of relations and exchanges serving multiple functions. Cinema must negotiate the terms and definitions of its constraints and freedoms in relation to the regulatory bodies within which it circulates. If there is a distinction to be made, it is that the censor in a state-controlled system is an easier beast to trick or tame simply by virtue of being identifiable and localized. The censor in Poland is not abstract; he is a figure who imposes himself between two parties, bearing the authority of the dominant force. A particular office determines which films will get made, which sections will be cut, which films will be distributed to which parts of the nation. These same decisions are made in democratic states, but the forces are dispersed into a series of relations and shifting market forces, and the public manages to remain unaware or unconcerned with these processes.
Given the centralization of what was understood to be the enemy forces in post-war Poland and the stakes in relation to the individual, there emerged a privileged relation between film and spectator whereby the two conspired to outwit and remain one step ahead of the rule-bound apparatus of bureaucratic censorship. The situation was described in an article on Polish cinema:
To cope with the constant threat of censorship, Polish filmmakers of the postwar era developed an entire repertoire of aesthetic and visual techniques to convey controversial ideas. Viewers learned to decipher them, and the very process of film reading became a substitute for forbidden political debates. (Sosnowski 1996: 13)
In this situation the technology that represents the world and its plots becomes the mediator through which the nation seeks to defend itself against the State. A State determined to annihilate its freedom and truth. The contest for truth is displaced from the streets and battlefields into the theatres. What is presented as fact is read as fiction, and what is presented as fiction is read as fact. The theatre becomes a space of silence, revolution and even betrayal. A secret discourse and illicit liaison emerges from within the 'unity' named Poland between a cultural form and its public.
Wajda describes the position of the film-maker as one who stands between a public with which he wants to communicate and a regime that would curtail the threat of this message. In this situation what he describes as the crucial problem is, '(...) not to accept or reject interference by the censor but to create work that makes the censor's methods inoperable! Only what stays within the range of the censor's imagination can be censored' (Wajda 1997: 109).
On the surface this situation seems to guarantee a profoundly original cinema whose survival as a free art form depends upon its ability to constantly curtail the law, or more specifically curtail work which merely reinforces existing structures. But while this situation appears to provide fertile ground on which to grow a political cinema, this strategy of disguise also presents the possibility of the text becoming an allegory for something more fundamental, and film reception merely the act of retrieving this hidden 'real' text. The universal serves as an allegory for a paricular, rather than vice versa. Nevertheless, the relation is the same, with one serving a merely referential relation to the 'true' representation. Polish spectatorship in this situation becomes merely an exercise in ideology critique in tandem with a conspiring film-maker. Though it can certainly be argued that the philosphical nature of Polish cinema is the product of these straegies and that the psychological or philosophical text refers back to the truly intended social text, this is the kind of interpretation from which Kieslowski would like to rescue his films. This is the fear beind Kieslowski's insistence that his films are not political, the fear that his films be read as political allegories and that the surface and depth of a cinema be lost or displaced by an expected formulaic politic.
Discussion of the allegorical and symbolic cannot be confined to the category of the aesthetic, unless that category displaces or overlays philosophy as a genre. The German Idealists understood that the manner in which these relations between the sensible and the unversal are ordered determines whether one's address is critical or dogmatic. In this case it is the qestion of interpretation, or truth. When Walter Benjamin challenges classical notions of the purity embodied in the sumbolic relation by privileging the allegorical (Benjamin 1990: 161-66), he not only redefines tragedy, but also the terms of interpretation and truth. Benjamin understands the agent of these transformations, not as the concept or subject, but as the medium - in this case film itself.
The Decalogue consists of ten short films that situate the biblical commandments in a contemporary, secular setting. The bilical Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, promises to provide the foundation of all law and justification. Kieslowski's Decalogue describes this 'foundation' as tragic. The Decalogue focuses on the collision between the biblical and the profane, interrogatign the conflict that emerges in their communication through the commandment. There is a paradox in this founding moment of the divine law: the Word as writing, enters the profane realm of the interpretable and can never be unmediated. If the universal law is delivered by Moses as the Word of God inscribed in stone, Moses becomes at this moment a mediator for a message that is to be taken as unmediated, direct, and unassailable. The law emerges in a realm of duplicity and multiplicity and insists on singularity. In other words, the law utters a commandment that can never be fulfilled. Furthermore, the act of representing the Word in film implies a further level of mediation. How is it that ten segments of the Decalogue do not degenerate into dramatic parables of a law that is commanded?
What is presented in the Decalogue is not the law, but the question of the law, and thus an ethics. The ethical and the political meet in action. The question of action is understood throughout Kieslowski's repertoire to be one of the dominant questions throughout post-war Polish cinema. The importance of the otherwise seemingly banal choices one makes on a daily basis becomes an obsession in this cinema. In an interview with journalists Kieslowski explained, 'Man does not choose between good and evil. He chooses between lesser and greater evil' (Turaj 1998: 39). There are two imortant components to this statement that make it perfectly descriptive of the tragic expression that emerges from this culture vested in Roman Catholicism and political struggle. First there is the conviction that one is damned in advance, that there will be no redemption in temporality; and second, that what is most important is choice.
This is well-illustrated in Kieslowski's film Blind Chance (1981). The narrative of this film is made up of three possible outcomes to Witek's efforts to catch a train. In the first narrative segment, he catches the train, meets a Communist and becomes a party member; in the second, he is arrested, convicted of a crime, and meets someone who inspires him to join the opposition; in the third, he misses the train, meets a girl who he later marries, leads an apolitical life as a doctor, and dies in a plane crash. Action is described here as political and metaphysical. It is the product of a freedom given only in chains. It requires a certain surrender to limitation that is a break with the multiplicity of consciousness. To act is to choose one destiny over another, to become part of a plot, or in other words, to occupy only a fragment of the world.
It is also here that tragedy and ethics reveal their complicity when action and its consequences expose the horror of freedom and responsibility. Kieslowski's Decalogue occupies this site of terror. These contingent moments, in which a chain of events is about to be determined, can be understood as the location of the missing God. Kieslowski marks this moment with the random, reciprocated gaze of a passing stranger. Eight of the ten films rely on the same reappearing actor to signal this moment. The actor never utters a word. His role is the simple gesture of looking up and meeting eyes at a key moment in the script. His gesture locates the ethical in the gaze of the other. The figure usually carries weighty objects - in one episode it is a boat over his shoulders, in another it is a ladder under his arm, and in another, heavy bags. In Decalogue 1 he is the vagrant warming his hands over a fire who sees a concerned father out late one night testing the frozen pond with a stick. Gradually he begins to appear as a secular Christ, an incarnation carrying the cross, the symbol of suffering and the burden of the will. I will look only at Decalogue 5 and 6.
The two central pieces of the Decalogue are episodes 5 and 6, 'You shall not kill' and 'You shall not commit adultery'. Kieslowski developed these two episodes into feature-length films, and they were released with limited US distribution in 1995 under the titles Short Film about Killing and Short Film about Love. In these pieces hatred and love, death and regeneration, and loving and killing are paired as the two broadest poles between which all human relations transpire. The commandment against killing has always been the most urgent, arising as it does on the most critical borders of subjectivity, where the other threatens to infringe in a manner that is absolute and irreparable. It is destined to undo itself in its own enforcement, in war and in capital punishment, where the profane law enacts the biblical one. The commandment against adulterous love also goes to the root. It regers specifically to any act of desire outside the marital union.
Decalogue 5 follows a killer, his victim, and a representative of the law through the arbitrary moments in their lives leading up to the act that will bring them into collision. Filmed through a filter that gives a nauseating yellow cast to a barren Poland in winter, the film begins with an object being thrown from an apartment window, nearly hitting a passer-by. This willed mishap and the arbitrariness of missing one's target sets the tone for the undercurrent of hostility and chance that will drive the entire script. The film follows the paths of Jacek, a young thug who wanders the city throwing rocks off overpasses and scaring pigeons; Piotr, a young idealistic law student who takes and passes his bar exams; and a common taxi driver caught up in the routines of his small life. A great deal of time is devoted to establishing the randomness of Jacek hailing that one cab and not another. Jacek instructs the driver to take a desolate route and brutally murders him.
No sympathy for the cab driver is developed in the script. He is brutish, cruel and dislikeable. The act speaks its own meaning. What is most striking is the awkwardness of the murder, the length of time it takes to achieve its aim, and the tragic, almost diabolical details that surround it. For example, a cyclist passes by slowly on the horizon without casting a look to the side as the man is being killed. Or, in another diabolical twist of fate, the taxi driver blows his horn for help just as a train passes and blows its own horn. When strangulation fails, Jacek delivers blows to the head of his victim. But the man refuses to die. After dragging the inert body to the river Jacek hears his victim uttering the word 'please'. In anguish he smashes a boulder over the man's skull, not stopping even after death has clearly arrived.
Jacek is defended unsuccessfully by the young lawyer Piotr, given the death penalty, and hanged by the State. The two murders are equated in the film by the rapid cut from the private murder to the state-sanctioned murder. On the day of his scheduled execution Jacek requests a visit from his lawyer. He traces the set of unhappy circumstances that led him to this moment, realizing with horror how this entire sequence of events might just as easily have never occurred. A lone official prepares the room for execution, checking mechanisms and installing the pan beneath the floorboard to catch the contents of the boy's bowels. A close-up of the pulleys and ropes of the machinery bears an uncanny resemblance to the close-up of the rope that Jacek wound mechanically around his own hands in the back of the cab. The officials come for Jacek but he and Piotr refuse to abide, insisting that there will never come a time in which they will be prepared to submit to the law. Force is enlisted and Piotr follows the terrified Jacek and a group of panicked officials through the dark corridors to the room where a noose is placed around Jacek's neck and a mechanical hatch opens the floor beneath him. Despite the official preparation, the execution does not go smoothly. The panic and discomfort of those involved resembles Jacek's own fumbling with the taxi driver. Like Jacek at the riverside, each occupant of the room is traumatized by the persistent address of life. But in the end the pan serves its purpose and the members of the room stand in silence, casting their eyes down before the deed, listening to the drippings from the boy's inert body fall into the steel pan.
What speaks in this room through the averted eyes of the participants and witnesses is the law. Each hears in this silence nothing but the thunderous collision between state and biblical law. The film concludes on a discordant and unsettling note that serves to complicate and interrogate the authority of both. In this case the enforcement of the biblical law only mimics the crime, drawing attention to the violence inherent in the very notion of law itself. Jacques Derrida demonstrates that law is meaningless and impotent if it cannot be enforced. Because force is essential to its meaning, violence founds the very structure that seeks to curtail violence. A further violence is done through the singularity that the law must each time address as a universal application. While law or limit is a necessary requirement in any attempt to do justice, each singular event demands a singular law, but for law to be law, it must be general. Divine authority that unfolds in a profane, interpretive world of forces becomes the very injustice it seeks to abolish.
Love in Decalogue 6 consists of both tenderness and violation, intersubjectivity and abysmal distance. Like the fifth episode, the sixth depicts a tendency for the commandment to unfold back upon itself, revealing its nature as an aporia. The film is of particular interest because in its portrayal of the voyeuristic gaze it offers a critique and complication of a discussion that has dominated modern film theory. The film depicts the obsessive desire of a young boy for an older woman living in the apartment opposite his window. Tomek takes over the room of a friend who is abroad, sharing the apartment with the friend's mother. From this position of standing in for another, under the authority of a mother who stands in for his own, he gazes at a distant love object (Magda) through a telescope. Nevertheless, Tomek is willing to take any measure to break through this distance and bring him closer to the object of his love. He takes advantage of his position as a postal clerk to slip phoney postal notices in her box so that she will have reason to approach his counter, he takes an early morning milk-delivery job in the hope of coming into contact with her at the doorstep, and every day he sets an alarm to the hour she is expected home so as to take up his position at the telescope. One evening, through his telescope, he watches her arrive home from a date, drop her head to the table, spill milk and cry inconsolably. The distance evaporates, and it seems as if the restless eye has arrived at its coveted destination.
One day at the post office Tomek reveals his secret to Magda. She is enraged. That evening she positions her bed directly in front of the window and invites in one of her lovers. When her lover learns that they are being watched he rushes outside and challenges Tomek to come out from hiding. Tomek emerges into the open courtyard in pajamas, defenceless, ready to declare and take responsibility for his desrie. He is beaten to the ground. The next morning Magda accosts Tomek during his delivery and tries to assess exactly what he wants from her. His response, 'nothing', perplexes her. Out of curiosity she agrees to meet him at a cafe where she learns that he no longer masturbates over her, or watches her having sex, and that his desire has turned into love. It has moved from an economy of exchange to one of the gift.
Cynical about love, she decides to seduce him and teach him that love is a myth. He ejaculates prematurely in his pants and she quickly retorts that this is love. Humiliated and disillusioned, he runs home and cuts his wrists. She sees him being taken away by ambulance and makes inquiries. Now she becomes the voyeur, resorting to binoculars and obsessively watching his window for his return. The film concludes with Magda discovering him one day back behind the counter at his postal job. She is ecstatic, but he greets her with indifference. He has overcome his love and her interest is rendered meaningless.
At the start of the film Tomek committed a theft: he stole a telescope. A telescope is a paradoxical object because it involves both distance and nearness. It permits its user to draw near to what is distant. But the voyeur steals. He or she watches from afar, gaining access without consent. Rather than condemning or embracing voyeurism, this film reveals a more difficult ethos: it is this violence of the gaze that allows the voyeur to see its object as subject, and thus to love. When Magda returns home from a bad date, spills milk, and in her loneliness puts her head down to cry, Tomek sees precisely what the other cannot share. In these stolen gazes Tomek sees her as only she knows herself, completely without defence or pretence. That this vision can only be taken as violation complicates desire considerably - love must come as a form of betrayal. This is not offered as a justification for the gaze, just as feminist film theory sought to reveal the underlying harm. Rather, what is revealed is the inability to stabilize the ethics of the gaze. This is the tragic tension that drives the camera and the cinema.
The distinction between a lover and a voyeur dissipates under the lens, and the apparatus of the telescope or camera becomes merely a prosthesis displacing the fact that all passions have an early life in which they are sheltered in secret and taken from afar. It is only in the act of confessing one's desire that one becomes vulnerable to the return of the gaze, either as desire of judgement. Such a moment comes for Tomek when he reveals his secret to Magda and later that night when he meets the challenge of her lover. Here, when he is ready to stand behind his desire and suffer its consequences, is the moment the gaze begins to shift hands, from his to hers. A certain power has been relinquished and he is now at her mercy. Her revenge is swift and brutal. Only in the boy's destruction, and in the suicidal gesture and its sacrificial severity, does Magda begin to comprehend the doublings of the gaze, and thus the possibility and impossiblity of love. But, tragically, understanding is only achieved throught the ruin, or violation of the other. The understanding comes too late and serves as an epitaph for the love.
In the feature-length version of this film the ending is altered significantly. After his return from the hospital Magda sees Tomek in his apartment, where he has come under the care of his friend's mother. Magda enters his home on two occasions in this version. By entering into the site from which he violated her, she is able to take up his position. She approaches the telescope and peers back into her own space. Oddly, through the telescope she sees herself on the night he fell in love with her, alone and crying, her head dropping onto the kitchen table and spilling the milk. When she looks upon herself she encounters the intersubjectivity in the gaze, the moment of love, of coveted understanding, but here this moment is depicted as a relexive gesture that occurs as auto-affection in the absence of a second party. In a similar vein, at the feature film's conclusion, Magda approaches the bed where Tomek lay sleeping. The mother of Tomek's friend places her hand gently over Tomek's inert hand. Magda repeats this gesture, and the film closes on the image of the three overlapped hands. While this version concludes with a silent hope for the possibility of love, it does so only under the averted, sleeping eyes of Tomek, who lay prostrate under the gaze of the two maternal fgures, both substitutes for a mother who is figured only as absence. This closeness continues to transpire at a distance, mimicking the paradox of the telescope. There is both hope and despair, possibility and impossibility.
The world Kieslowski discloses in the Decalogue is one of perpetual decision and mishap. Yet human action is not the sole and guiding force that directs the outcome of events. It is subsumed under, and functions within, the larger schema of a seemingly arbitrary fate. The patterns in which things fall together might easily have been otherwise, and yet their occurence marks a certain fundamental chaos, which one is strangely impelled to call fate. It is in the light of this collision between freedom and necessity, particularity and abstraction, state and biblical power that human action takes on its pathos and its tragic demand.
The Decalogue is the product of a national context that has emerged and maintained itself within the double bind, relentlessly staging this encounter between historical and universal forces. This cinema born of collision has had to negotiate the relation between film and law on all levels, and transverse the political, the historical and the philosophical. Its expression will not be easily understood within a strictly political or ideological reading, nor will can it be reduced to an abstract, universal musing. Rather, it invokes a tragic form of justice that departs significantly from the classic liberal interpretations of justice and law.