Kieslowski's Decalogue: Broken Commandments, Shattered Lives

by Philip Sicker

Overview

Written and produced under martial law in 1980’s Communist Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 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: Kieślowski’s protagonists break the Commandments in a fractured world drained of meaning. Disintegration functions as a multidimensional principle—moral, historical, social, and psychological—informing The Decalogue’s conception, organization, and style. In analyzing these features the study draws on a wide range of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic inter-texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783034351188
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Series:	Film Cultures , #14
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x (d)

About the Author

Philip Sicker was a Professor of English at Fordham University for forty-three years, specializing in modern literature, the novel, and film.

Table of Contents

List of Figures – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Language and Silence in Decalogue One – The Ruptured World of Decalogue Two – Taking the Long Way Home: Decalogue Three – The Death of Authority in Decalogue Four – Mistakes of a Huge Machine: Murder and Injustice in Decalogue Five – Disrupting the Gaze in Decalogue Six – Fractured Fairy Tales: Stolen Childhood in Decalogue Seven – Dislocated Histories: Bearing Witness in Decalogue Eight – Divine Possession: Metaphysical Covetousness in Decalogue Nine – A Broken Series: Decalogue Ten – Index.