Kieslowski's Decalogue

Broken Commandments, Shattered Lives

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by Philip Sicker

Type: Studies
Subject: One Film > Dekalog
Keywords: Krzysztof Kieslowski, philosophy
Publishing date: 2025 (January 14, 2025)
Publisher: Peter Lang
Collection: Film Cultures
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 226 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-3-0343-5118-8

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Book Presentation:
The book is a study of the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part series, The Decalogue, focusing on his complex and ambiguous meditations on the meaning of the Ten Commandments in late-1980s Poland, a time of moral uncertainty, social discord, and cultural disintegration.

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.

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.

See the publisher website: Peter Lang

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