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Kieslowski says he did a lot of research before undertaking the project, but "didn't want to preach."

"We read everything it was possible to read in libraries: a mass of interpretations of the Commandments, discussions and commentaries on the Bible, both Old and New Testaments," he is quoted in the booklet that comes with the DVD boxed set. "But we decided fairly quickly to dispense with all this. Priests draw upon it every day and we weren't here to preach.

"We didn't want to adopt the tone of those who praise or condemn, handing out a reward here for the doing of Good and a punishment there for the doing of Evil. Rather, we wished to say: 'We know no more than you. But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.'

"Once this approach had been decided, we found it easier to solve the problem of the relationship between the films and the individual Commandments: a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our lives. We were aware that no philosophy or ideology had ever challenged the fundamental tenets of the Commandments during their several thousand years of existence, yet they are nevertheless transgressed on a routine basis."

Kieslowski and Piesiewicz decided to make the relations of the films to the commandments just as they are in our real lives: harder to paint in black and white, often ambiguous, and difficult to separate one from another—as you break one commandment, others often follow in its footsteps. Rather than becoming Sunday school illustrations, they become soul-stirring invitations to confront one's own demons and to recognize the few angels in our midst.

Because of the religious inception of the films, God is dealt with a little more explicitly than in his other movies. In the first episode, a young boy, Pavel, asks his aunt, "What's God?" In answer, she hugs him. Later the boy sees a postcard of Pope John Paul II and asks if he has the answers; his aunt answers that she thinks so. In a later episode there is another photo of the Pope, goofily putting his hands over his eyes like glasses: maybe he doesn't have all the answers. Pavel's father believes his computer instead of God, but finds his trust in technology to be tragically misplaced. He enters a church in despair and bumps into a table of candles; drips of wax fall down a painted icon of the face of Mary, as though she weeps for him.

In the eighth episode, an ethics professor is confronted with a haunting choice she made in the past, during the Holocaust. When her interlocutor asks her who judges what is Good, she replies, "He who is in all of us." But she adds, "I am reluctant to use the word God. One can believe without having to use certain words. Man was created in order to choose. … If so, perhaps we can leave God out of it."

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Two of the episodes were made into longer features, one titled A Short Film About Killing, which played a major role in the abolishment of capital punishment in Poland, and A Short Film About Love, about a young man who is a voyeur. The latter is Kieslowski's most Hitchcockian film, yet without the guilt; the young man truly loves the woman he watches, and brings about a change in her character with his confession and his suicide attempt after she humiliates him.

Most intriguingly, nearly all the Decalogue episodes feature a character, played by Artur Barcis, who never speaks, who has been called variously The Watcher, The Guardian, The Angel of Fate, and most recently Theophanes (by Joe Kickasola in his Spiritus Award-winning book, The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Liminal Image). Kieslowski and Piesiewicz merely refer to him as "The Young Man" in their scripts, and Kieslowski never said anything about him except that "He's not very pleased with us."

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Related Elsewhere:

The CT Review: The Ten Commandments Become Flesh	Printer view
A Polish director prods European and American audiences to consider God's timeless standards.

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Out of the Darkness	Printer view
Entering the world of Krzysztof Kieslowski.