Cohesion in the Decalogue

       Though each of the episodes of the Decalogue, were very different stories, and seemed entirely separate from one another, director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, used many techniques to connect them all together. I noticed some of them on my own, but I discovered some of the others while reading Mario Sesti’s article on the The Decalogue 1-10 in The Hidden God: Film and Faith. This book is a compilation by the Museum of Modern Art of 50 essays written by 35 various writers about the more or less religious themes in over 50 various, international films. 

The first of Kieslowski’s cohesion techniques that one that I noticed was the use of the same setting for every episode. This may be because it is one of the more easily recognized ones. As previously mentioned in several blog posts, the setting was a dark, gloomy, Warsaw apartment complex. Towards the later episodes one may recognize this, and that each main character of the previous episodes has a strong connection to the complex. 

The weather was generally the same throughout most of the episodes: cold, foggy, cloudy, rainy, and gloomy. Though it is usually cooler in Poland, the constant fog and cloudiness is unrealistic of Polish weather. Like that of most other countries, Poland’s weather varies highly, and may be cloudy one day, yet sunny the next. I believe that Kieslowski used this as another method of bringing cohesiveness to the Decalogue as a whole. It helped set the mood. 

The biggest technique he used (that I cannot believe I see myself in its entirety until reading Sesti’s essay) was to intermittently include a character played by Artur Barcis in 8 of the 10 episodes. The only 2 episodes he does not appear in are 7 and 10, and that was only because Kieslowski did not like the way the shots of him turned out for these episodes. According to Sesti, Barcis’ character is an “angelic presence that never interferes with action”. There are times where he looks directly into the camera. The viewer is unable to identify with him, because “his presence suggests the inflexibility of fate and the vulnerability of every individual.” (Sesti 184) I think Kieslowski’s use of Artur Barcis’ character was very clever use of a rarely used cohesion technique. 

A smaller, more ambiguous technique Kieslowski used was cross referencing. An example was having a character from episode 8 tell the plot of episode 2 to another character to move the storyline of that episode along. Later, a character in episode 10 makes a very brief appearance in episode 8. The main characters of episode 2 appear transiently in episode 5. And the list of cross references goes on. According to Sesti, Kieslowski did this to “weave the single episodes into an overall tapestry”.