Kieslowski and Religion

The Decalogue Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Essentially Christian World-View of an Atheist*

1

The issue of religious and Christian belief among artists, and in the case of my research, filmmakers, is a point of considerable interest in the ever more crucial dialogue between religion and culture. The issue raises a variety of questions regarding cinema. How can religious belief or non-belief or uncertain belief be discerned and specified in the filmmaker’s work? Is belief necessary in the filmmaker who proposes to make a film about Jesus or about Christian experience? Is the believing, card-carrying Christian better equipped than others to make such a film? Should a distinction be made between explicit belief and implicit belief? Or between firm, orthodox belief and agnostic, struggling belief? Can a non-Christian filmmaker, a Buddhist or Muslim for example, make a film that has relevance for the Christian culture and belief? Is Christian moral behavior a necessary prerequisite in a filmmaker? The belief “card” is one that is sometimes played openly by filmmakers, often, unfortunately, as a stratagem for the marketing of a film. For example, when The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, the Italo-American Martin Scorsese, nervous about the public outrage over his “scandal” film, proclaimed, rather too insistently, that he was a catholic and that he even had studied a catholic seminary, as if somehow that justified the confused vision and excesses of his film. Franco Zeffirelli repeatedly has defended his Jesus of Nazareth (1977) as the finest of the Jesus films, by insisting on his own orthodox Catholicism and by questioning the value of rival Jesus films on the basis of the nonbelief and unorthodox moral behavior of their directors. More recently Mel Gibson made much of his own catholic belief and practice as a justification for claiming the maximum authenticity and validity of his The Passion of the Christ (2004), claims that have been

References: to God Though elements of the Christian experience of God are common to many of the characters in the Decalogue films, in three of them Kieslowski embodies very direct, thematic references to God and faith, so pointed and clear, in fact, that they seem to reflect dimensions of Kieslowski’s own experience. In the Catholic-born but agnostic university professor of Decalogue One, to whom Kieslowski gives his own first name, the director represents a journey from skepticism and indifference regarding issues of religious faith—the man answers his little son’s anguished questions about the meaning of life, death, 3 the soul, with technical-scientific explanations that are clearly unsatisfactory to the boy—to the first evidence of a renewed faith in the God of his youth. In the conclusion of the film, Krzysztof, grieving from the accidental death of his son for which he accepts responsibility, enters a catholic church, expresses his anguish in the violent gesture of pushing down a temporary altar, perceives a sign of God’s mercy and submits to a kind of personal rite of baptism and spiritual renewal. About this rebellious act, Kieslowski, who like his film’s protagonist denies the existence of God, comments paradoxically, “In an act of rebellion, we come to recognize that someone who did not seem to us to exist, in fact does exist. Rebellion is a manifestation of the faith that one denies ... clearly he [the protagonist] is rebelling against God.”6 In the same film, the sister of the protagonist—Kieslowski too has a sister—is a practicing Catholic and indeed arranges for her little nephew to attend religion classes at a nearby parish. When the boy enquires about God, she gives him a warm hug; the boy says that he feels loved and his aunt explains that “God is in that [love].” If Irena’s vivid and concrete faith in God as love, in the God of Love, is in contrast to her brother’s agnosticism—she explains to her nephew that both she and his father were raised Catholics but that early on, the father found another way of understanding the world around him, the way of reason—her reaction to the boy’s tragic death is also in contrast to Krzysztof’s. While he goes into a church and prays, Kieslowski has Irena wander crying through the deserted night streets in a response that clearly suggests in her a moment of agnosticism, normal in that terrible situation and evidently a dimension of the religious experience of Kieslowski and, in fact, of many true believers. In Decalogue Two, one of the protagonists seems to suggest further dimensions of Kieslowski’s complex experience of faith. A medical doctor and surgeon, the old man has for many years been something of a recluse, a reaction to the tragic death of his wife and two young children during the Second World War. When a woman whose dying husband he is treating desperately presses him for information about her husband, he coldly keeps her at a distance. In frustration one day, she confronts him: “Do you believe in God?” In a quiet voice, full of pain, he responds “I have a private God ...” In the reticence of the doctor, in his apparent rejection of formal religious practice, there seems to be much of Kieslowski. Then in Decalogue Eight, Kieslowski creates a character who in some ways is parallel to the doctor in Two and very close to himself. Zofia—the reference to the Greek word for wisdom, sophía, is transparent— is about the same age as the doctor and a university professor of moral philosophy. Kieslowski represents her in a crowded amphitheater directing a seminar on the “ethical inferno,” that is on the great difficulty of making good moral decisions in the confusion of the postmodern world. Zofia’s pedagogical method is to present her students with concrete cases of moral crises and moral decisions—a method clearly parallel to Kieslowski’s “pedagogical” method in the Decalogue films—thus putting these students in a position in which the “Good” in each of them will express itself and lead them to make the right moral judgments and decisions. In response to an interlocutor’s comment, “I’ve never read anything in your work about God,” Zofia answers, “I don’t go to church, I don’t use the word ‘God,’ but that does not mean he does not exist.” The woman’s position, her approach to the issue of God here—her own belief and her method for raising the God issue with her students—is precisely that of Kieslowski in his ten short films. Moral Themes in a Christian Perspective If Decalogue One, Two and Eight underline in a more specific way than the other films in the series, the God and faith issue from a Christian perspective, they, as well as the other films, also approach this issue indirectly, by representing a wide range of moral themes that are very clearly Christian in their substance or in their reach. Three of the films, Two, Three and Nine, for example, investigate the crucial theme of faithfulness in marriage. In all three films, one or both partners have broken their marriage 4 vows: the wife Dorota in Two, who is pregnant by her lover; the husband Janusz in Three, who, after attending Midnight Mass with his wife and children, deserts them on Christmas Eve to be with his former mistress; and both protagonists in Nine, a young surgeon who admits to have had many casual affairs in the past and his wife who in the present time is having a casual affair with a university student. These cases of infidelity are very different among themselves and clearly all very complex human situations, but in the course of each of the films, Kieslowski leads all four protagonists, out of love for their partners, to understand, appreciate and regret the moral wrong of their choices, and to choose freely to end their illicit liaisons and to renew their marriage committments. In the Decalogue films, a corollary theme to that of the sacredness of marriage is that of the utter sacredness of the child—a theme clearly underlined by Jesus in the Gospel—and of the awesome responsibility of the parent towards the child. In Decalogue Two, for example, the old doctor, still grieving forty years after the tragic death of his children, does all he can to save the life of an unborn child; further, in the conclusion of the film, and reflecting a beautiful sense of the superabundance of grace, the husband of the mother of that child anticipates with joy the birth of the child though clearly it is not his, saying dramatically, “We are going to have a child.” In Decalogue Four, Kieslowski neatly widens the meaning of the fourth commandment—“Honor your father and your mother”—to include the responsibility of the parent for the child. A precocious nineteen year old girl announces dramatically to her fortyish and widowed father, that he is not her biological parent, supporting her contention with convincing evidence, and then she initiates an elaborate seduction attempt. The father/non-father struggles to resist the temptation and in the end, courageously proclaiming that the true meaning of parenthood is far more an existential, moral reality than a biological connection, he reaffirms his responsibility as father, saving his daughter and himself from a terrible moral tragedy: he has learned to love. Further regarding adult responsibility for children, in Decalogue Five, Kieslowski has a young man condemned to death confess to his lawyer that he is responsible for the tragic death of his little sister, a sin/crime that has made him into a pariah and finally brought him to an ignoble end. In Eight, a terrible sin of irresponsibility committed forty years previously against a little Jewish girl seeking refuge from the Nazis, the source of much guilt and anguish in the professor-protagonist ever since, becomes the motivation for her statement of moral principle that nothing is more important than the life of a child. And in the course of that same film, Kieslowski represents the grace of forgiveness and reconciliation between the sinner and the victim, now an adult but still carrying the pain of the earlier rejection. Finally in Nine, Kieslowski points to the adoption of an orphan child as a sign of the reconciliation and new hope for the couple of protagonists, a sign that their marriage, previously childless by their irresponsible design, is now going to be lived responsibly and fruitfully. In all the Decalogue films, Kieslowski insists that human life is sacred and to be protected and fostered, clearly a fundamental Christian principle. He represents the death of the little boy in One and the little girl in Five as particularly tragic events, terrible moral failures of those responsible, and he makes clear the joy with which the birth of a child must welcomed: the first-born child of the lawyer and his wife in Five, which serves as one of the few signs of hope in that otherwise bleak film, and the joy of the father/non-father of the child to be born in Two. In Decalogue Two, Kieslowski adopts a clear antiabortion position, when, in spite of the protagonist Dorota’s decision to abort her unborn child if her husband, who is not the father of the child, survives his cancer, Kieslowski shifts the narrative to bring miraculous healing to the dying husband and to save the life to the unborn child. Again in favor of life, in Decalogue Nine Kieslowski saves the protagonist from the tragic absurdity of suicide, giving him hope and love, and in Five, he represents as unspeakable horrors both the cruel and unmotivated murder and the even more terrifying state-sanctioned execution of the killer. 5 The Fundamental Christian Pattern of Sin, Grace, Forgiveness and Reconciliation To be a Christian is to believe that one’s personal sinfulness is met by saving grace in Jesus Christ; it is to experience that grace personally in the fundamental human dynamic of repentance, confession, forgiveness and reconciliation. In the Decalogue films, Kieslowski refers to this most basic Christian moral pattern over and over again, and not in peripheral actions but in the central moral dynamics at work in the protagonists. The possibility, “the prospect of redemption in the Christian pattern”7 is a clearly a theme that pervades the entire Decalogue cycle. This redemptive pattern is easily recognized in the ultimately fruitful struggle of Dorota in Decalogue Two to reconcile with her husband; in the final confessions and reconciliations between the unfaithful husband and his wife in Three; and in the healing confession and reconciliation between the daughter and her father in the conclusion of Four. Confession of sin, forgiveness and reconciliation is the basic salvific pattern at work in the conversation between the condemned man, Jacek, and his lawyer in Decalogue Five; in this remarkable scene, the young lawyer, a good and righteous man, is more a sacramental presence, more a priest-confessor, than the actual priest who appears later in the execution scene. This same salvific theme is the fundamental pattern of the entire narrative of Eight from the very beginning: the woman sinned against takes the role of the accuser, and the woman who sinned, then confesses, seeks forgiveness and accepts reconciliation in a remarkably beautiful, sacred and fundamentally Christian moment. In Decalogue Nine, both partners in the marriage have sinned against each other in a variety of ways. But in the course of the film, and not without much struggle and pain, Kieslowski has them both recognize the destructive power of their sinful behavior, confess to each other and begin a long process of healing reconciliation. If Ten seems at first to be about the dangers of coveting material goods, in fact, behind this evident theme, and in spite of the comic tone of the film, unique in the Decalogue series, Kieslowski develops another and a more significant moral dynamic, that of the reunion and reconciliation of two estranged brothers, who, in fact, in the course of the film accuse and betray each other. Kieslowski’s lingering closeups on the faces of each of the betrayers make clear their awareness of the gravity of their sin, but then, in the final scene of the film, they confess to each other and, in a burst of laughter— echoed inevitably in the satisfied laughter of the viewers of this exceptional film—effect a spectacular reconciliation which is a moment of pure grace. In the Christian tradition, the saving grace of Jesus Christ expresses itself in the context of the Christian community, in favor of the building up of that community which is the Mystical Body of Christ, in favor of the breaking down of the barriers of egoism, fear, sinfulness, between people that destroy that Body. As we have suggested already, in most of the films of the Decalogue, Kieslowski investigates this theme of the creation of community and communion out of diversity and self-isolation. Some of the examples of this breaking down of barriers are dramatic: the passage from animosity to friendship between the desperate wife of the dying man and the reclusive old doctor in Decalogue Two; the affirmation of family in the life-saving shift in the relationship between father and daughter in Decalogue Four; the salvific conversation between the wholly unsympathetic young punk killer and his lawyer in Five; and the reconciliation between the jealous and suicidal doctor and his wife in Nine, who in the breaking down of the barriers between themselves, also graciously open up their relationship to an unwanted child. The Icon and the Cross: Essential Christian Symbols In his exploration of these essentially Christian themes, Kieslowski’s makes conscious use of concrete Christian religious objects and symbols, a technique of reinforcing his themes that is never heavyhanded, out of place or kitsch, as if often the case with filmmakers who have moved away from the 6 faith. In these ten films, the wealth of concrete religious references cannot be dismissed simply as casual elements of the catholic cultural background of the director. The care with which Kieslowski subtley embeds these references in the text of the films, so fully in synch with the development of the plot and the characters, and the clear significance to the film texts of the Transcendent God to whom these Christian references point, declare Kieslowski’s sincerity and seriousness. Twice in the Decalogue, Kieslowski inserts visual references to sacred icons. Both times they are icons of the Madonna and Child and therefore images of the Incarnation of God into human experience and into all of its ambiguity. In the conclusion of Decalogue One, the protagonist Krzysztof, having in anger toppled the altar in the church, finds himself face to face with the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa. Tears of dripping wax form on the Madonna’s face as she “cries” both for her son who is to die and for Krzysztof’s son who has just now died. Since the nature of the icon is to point the viewer beyond itself to the Transcendent, this image clearly suggests that in that moment of Krzysztof’s terrible suffering, God is in communion with him and shares his pain. In Decalogue Eight, another icon of the Madonna and Child, again surrounded by lighted candles, a sign of God’s Incarnation as light into the darkness of human existence—“the light shines in the darkness” (John 1:5)—watches benevolently over the protagonists as each enters a shadowy, menacing courtyard to face a moment of dark truth about herself. There is an uncanny sense that when, soon after their chance encounter with the sacred icon, the two women reconcile, the icon and the God it points to, are somehow responsible. Over and over again in the Decalogue, the perceptive viewer notes visual references to crosses, the Christian symbol par excellence of the redemptive death of Christ for the salvation of humanity. In the facade of the unfinished church in One, seen from the outside several times in the film, and then from the inside in its conclusion, a huge cross associates the passion of Krzysztof to that of Christ, and prepares for his baptismal act in the sign of the cross. The gold cross on the chain around the neck of the troubled Elzbieta in Eight and that worn by the suffering and suicidal surgeon Roman in Nine, also point to the event of Salvation that they are living through, in spite of the darkness of the present moment. Then, in the latter case, Kieslowski has Roman go to what he believes will be his death literally under a cross in the bell tower of a church in the distance, a cross which the director carefully and deliberately holds twice over the man’s head in the composition: the Christian mystery of death and resurrection are moving in Roman’s life and he will be saved. Twice in Decalogue Six, Kieslowski creates abstract crosses in the background of crucial actions of the protagonist Tomek: in a window as the young man “steals” the telescope which will permit him to get close to and save the woman he loves and in the door of the building towards which Tomek climbs after his rejection by the woman and as he is about to shed his blood for her salvation: the allusion to the saving event on Calvary is clear. Repeatedly in Kieslowski’s series, the words “God” and “Jesus” are used. The young killer in Five, for example, as he looks on the bloodied face of his agonizing victim, murmurs “Jesus!” More a prayer, a christian prayer—in the face of the horror he is committing—than a blasphemy, it also suggests Jacek’s recognition of the suffering Jesus in his victim. Certainly in the shocking close-up of the bruised face of the victim, blood flowing from his head as if from a crown of thorns, Kieslowski is making a visual allusion to the “Ecce homo” image or to the crucified Christ. The wife of Roman in Nine, on hearing on the telephone the voice of the husband she thinks dead, says softly, “God, you’re there,” unequivocally a prayer of thanksgiving. And in Decalogue Ten, in a beautiful moment representing the ongoing reconciliation of the two estranged brothers, one of them says, “God, I feel free.” He too, perhaps without fully realizing the significance of what he is saying, seems to be thanking God for the grace received. 7 A Sign of Hope in a Broken World: The Providential Man of Mystery There is little doubt that Kieslowski places his characters in a fragmented postmodern world vitiated by a breakdown of moral values, by lonely, anonymous living, by materialism and practical atheism. In this broken world he allows them to commit a wide variety of sins: the denial of God, the violation of the Sabbath, marital infidelity, lying, stealing, killing, to name only a few. But, in the Christian pattern, Kieslowski also offers his characters hope. In the black-humor prologue and the closing credits of Decalogue Ten, Kieslowski inserts on the soundtrack of the film the violent, trangressive-rock lyrics of one the brother protagonists and his “City Death” band: “Kill, kill, kill / Screw who you will / Lust and crave / Pervert and deprave / Everyday of the week ... On Sunday hit mother / Hit father, hit brother / Hit sister, the weakest / Steal from the meekest ...” The words represent an ironic anti-decalogue, a comment on the behavior of the Decalogue’s characters and on the duplicity of human nature, something suggested by Kieslowski as one of his motives for making these films: “What fascinates me about the Commandments is that we all agree that they are just and appropriate, but at the same time, we violate them everday. They interest me because they allow me to examine the moral ambivalence of human beings.”8 But Artur’s song inevitably is recognized by sensitive viewers as ironic precisely because in all but one of the films, Kieslowski represents characters who, though initially lost, ambivalent or wandering dangerously in patterns of sinfulness, succeed in overcoming their immorality and in restoring moral-spiritual order in their lives. In the complex challenges to moral behavior that face the characters in the Decalogue films, referred to by the professor of moral philosophy in Eight as an “ethical inferno,” these people need help if they are to survive and bring hope to the world. And Kieslowski gives them help, in each other, in fortuitous events of grace, and in the mysterious character who appears in nine of the ten films, in a different guise and with different behavior each time. Kieslowski responds to questions about this Man of Mystery with characteristically enigmatic comments: “There’s this guy who wanders around in all the films. I don’t know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches.”9 They are comments which do not do justice to the importance both structurally and morally-spiritually of this enigmatic figure, whose discrete appearances and timing are specifically coordinated in each film with a precise motive, a precise effect and a specific significance. Generally speaking, the Man of Mystery has a spiritual identity and role: at times he represents the presence of God, at times the providential hand of God; at times he accompanies the protagonists anonymously and invisibly (to them, but not to the viewer of the film) rather like a guardian angel. Artur Barcis, the actor who plays the Man of Mystery, suggests significantly that at times his character “might be Christ who could meet a person at any time.”10 In some situations the Man of Mystery interferes directly in the actions of the protagonists and normally when he appears, his presence signals a positive shift in the narrative, the presence and action of grace. In Decalogue One, the Man of Mystery, framed repeatedly sitting in front of a blazing fire on the edge of an icy pond, is a beacon of light and warmth in the otherwise desolate winter landscape. In his contemplative stance and in the warm red and orange colors of his appearance, he is identified by Kieslowski with the icon of the Madonna and Child at the end of the film. Further, in the editing of the film, he is unequivocally identified with God and love; directly if silently, he challenges the protagonist Krzysztof before the tragedy and in the film’s conclusion, he receives in death little Pawel, the innocent victim of his father’s idolatry. In Decalogue Two, the Man of Mystery clearly is a life-giving force, present as a doctor at Dorota’s declaration of love to her dying husband, a declaration which becomes a healing experience for him; he is also present as the doctors make a decision which indirectly prevents an abortion. In Three, he is disguised as a tram driver at the most dangerous moment in the illicit couple’s game of brinkmanship; his providential presence prevents a tragedy and sets them on the right path. The Man of Mystery appears as a canoeist in Four, manifests himself to the precocious daughter, clearly preventing her from 8 opening a letter that might do her and her father much harm, and he reappears in the same guise when, in the conclusion, the right moral order is restored between daughter and father. It is as if he wishes to confirm that order, as if he is a visible expression of that order. In Decalogue Five, the Man of Mystery assumes the guise of a road surveyor who makes makes eyecontact with the young murderer, evidently trying to dissuade him from his terrible decision. Later, in an allusion to the superabundance of unmerited grace, the Man reappears twice in the prison on the day of Jacek’s execution, once with a ladder, as if preparing to meet Jacek in death, to take him “down from his cross” and lead him up to heaven, and once for the young lawyer, as if to strengthen him for his talk with Jacek, a meeting that becomes an opportunity of saving grace for the condemned man. In Decalogue Six, the Man of Mystery meets the protagonist Christ-figure twice, once when he succeeds for the first time in communicating his love to the woman and again when he is about to give up his life for her, acting here almost like the ministering angel from heaven who comes to Jesus in the Garden of Olives (Luke 22: 43). He appears as a student in the seminar of Zofia in Eight, in which he participates in the suffering of both women during a violent verbal confrontation, and no doubt this presence of grace is instrumental in the later reconciliation of the women. In Decalogue Nine, the Man of Mystery is a bicyclist, whose guardian presence twice saves the life of the suicidal surgeon; here, as in Two, Kieslowski suggests that the Man’s saving grace works parallel to the grace of the deep love of the victim’s wife for her husband.11 Human Freedom: The Possibility of Refusing Grace A fundamental, constitutional element of the Christian experience is the exercise of human freedom. The teaching and practice of Jesus, the entire New Testament and two-thousand years of Christian history make it abundantly clear how the person called by God in Jesus is free to accept the call of grace or to refuse it. Kieslowski respects this essential pattern of the possibility of the rejection of grace, the refusal of salvation in his films. Though in most of his films, the Polish director represents the successful experience of salvation and hope and love, in Decalogue Seven, he radically shifts register and creates a moral-spiritual wasteland. Easily the bleakest of the films, Seven does not manifest any opening to grace or hope, and its psychological violence is far more shocking than the physical violence of Five. Two women, mother and daughter, are aggressive opponents, struggling violently for the affection of the little daughter of the daughter, legally adopted at birth by her grandmother. The women, both seriously unbalanced emotionally, insist repeatedly that they “love” little Anka, but it soon becomes abundantly clear that neither woman is capable of love. They can only battle each other to possess her like an object, body and soul: the two scenes in which the birth mother insists hysterically that Anka call her “mother,” a request obstinately rejected by the little girl, are truly horrific. Given the moral principle proposed by Kieslowski and by Zofia, the professor, in Eight, that there is no higher value in this world than the life of a child, the violence against little Anka in Decalogue Seven suggests that the sin of the two women is indeed grave. This is why Kieslowski limits the providential Man of Mystery to two brief and ambiguous appearances in Seven; he is barely glimpsed near a telephone booth as the two older women confront each other; then he is seem at the train station in the concluding scene of the film, from the protagonists, hobbling across the background on crutches.12 Where there is no love—for both Kieslowski and for the Jesus of christian faith the gravest sin—divine Providence, the power of grace, represented by this mysterious figure is unable to function. The final shot of the film, a terrifying close-up of little Anka standing on the station platform, literally halfway between her grandmother-mother and her mother-sister, her mouth wide open as if to scream, but no sound comes out. The allusion to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” is undeniable. Like the dark, distorted, despairing world of that painting, the world Kieslowski represents in Decalogue Seven is tragically closed to love and so, closed to grace, closed to God. 9 If Decalogue Seven represents the possibility of utter moral failure for lack of love, then Decalogue Six represents a resounding moral-spiritual success in a strictly christic pattern. In Six, Kieslowski adopts an entire narrative and moral pattern directly from the New Testament to examine the human dynamic of the experience of saving, redemptive love. Six, as we have already suggested, narrates the story of an innocent young man named Tomek who deeply and chastely loves an older woman, a woman given to promiscuous sexual activity. She brutally rejects him and in a conscious attempt to save her, Tomek sheds his blood. The young man’s sacrificial act redeems the woman as she is converted to a new and chaste way of expressing love, in a remarkable dynamic of salvation that includes the elements of repentance, confession and reconciliation. When, late in the film, Kieslowski reveals the woman’s name as “Maria Magdalena,” the minimally-astute viewer recognizes the New Testament reference and uses it as a hermeneutic to re-examine the personality and behavior of Tomek in the entire film, concluding that in him, Kieslowski has created a metaphorical representation of Jesus Christ, a classical Christ-figure.13 Thus, the director roots both the sacrificial saving love of Tomek and the conversion to love of Maria Magdalena-Magda in the archetypal Christian pattern of sinfulness, contrition, amendment and salvation. The Fundamental Christian Law of Love As this essay has pointed out, in his Decalogue films, Kieslowski examines a wide variety of human behavioral patterns, both sinful and graced, a thematic pattern consonant with the title and basic concept of the series and with their reference to the Old Testament Mosaic law. However, there is an abundance of evidence in the films suggesting that behind and within Kieslowski’s focus on the moral imperative of each of the Mosaic commandments and on the relevance of these moral principles today, the Polish film director has a more essential and much richer moral-spiritual focus, that is, on the New Testament commandment to love as the most fundamental moral imperative for men and women today, a moral imperative that, as Jesus teaches, transcends the individual focus of each of the Mosaic commandments. In Matthew 25 and Mark 12, Jesus proposes the love of God and the love of neighbor as the greatest commandment, the fulfillment of the Old Testament law. Then in a profound spiritual insight into the words of Jesus, St. John develops the dynamic of the great commandment when he insists that love of neighbor is a prerequisite for love of God and for contact with God: “No one has ever seen God, if we love one another, God lives in us ... those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4: 12, 20) The evidence of Kieslowski’s focus on the New Testament law of love is overwhelming. Much of it has been at least alluded to in this essay, but here, we develop a brief concluding synthesis. The experience of Christian love is present, somehow, in all the films and not only as a theme but rather as a central dynamic. In the Decalogue, the sins committed are almost all sins against love: the infidelity of the wife in Two and the rejection of a needful child in Eight; the cruel seduction in Six and the morbid suspicions of the husband in Nine; the mutual betrayal of brothers in Ten and the tragic narcissistic possessiveness of the grandmother and mother in Seven. The graced moments of conversion, forgiveness, reconciliation are all expressions of love: the presence of God in the love between the father and son in One; the victory of responsible love in Four; the sacramental power of the caring love of the lawyer for the condemned man in Five; Magda’s wonderful conversion by love and to love in Six; and the final affirmation of forgiving and hopeful love in Nine. Clearly the Decalogue films provide a magnificent series of case studies of how the Christian virtue and gift of love lead women and men who love and are loved in graced journeys from isolation to integration, from egoism to altruism, from manipulation to caritas, from doubt to belief. In these films, the women and men who love, move forward, overcome barriers, are integrated into each other and into the fabric of society. Kieslowski leads them, often along difficult paths, from sin, to forgiveness, 10 to love, to grace, and thence, to God. It is difficult to imagine a more deeply Christian journey. Christian Love in Kieslowski’s Later Films: Veronica and Three Colors: Blue, White, Red Kieslowski’s vision of the law of love as the only hope for moral survival, for touching God and for being touched by God, and so for human salvation, does not end with the Decalogue. The Polish director carries forward this essential Christian vision into the four films that follow the Decalogue series, his final four films. In The Double Life of Veronica (1991), perhaps the most mysterious of his films, Kieslowski examines in the experience of the two young women called Veronica, the miraculous power of the transcendent experience of loving across the barriers of time and space and even death. In the providential puppet-master/teacher Fabbri, he refines the character of the Man of Mystery of the Decalogue films, and suggests in Fabbri’s encounter with the French Veronique, nothing less than the graced meeting of the human being with the God of Love. In the Three Colors (1993-1994) trilogy, perhaps Kieslowski’s best-known work, the saving power of love in the christic pattern of the New Testament is a constant theme. In Film White, love transcends the betrayals and infidelities of the two protagonists to bring hope into their broken marriage, and in Film Red, a delicate love relationship between a reclusive old man and a young woman, brings renewal, hope and life to both of them. But it is especially in Film Blue that Kieslowski’s Christian moral vision expresses itself with consummate beauty and power. The film’s protagonist, a young woman, Julie, after the unspeakable and morally- and spiritually-debilitating tragedy of the sudden death of her husband and daughter, and through the experience of being loved by gentle and patient people, learns again to love. At first, Julie hides from people, isolates herself, refuses all connections and ties that might lead again to love, and, as she sees it, to further pain. But very gradually, as she receives love and allows herself to respond spontaneously with gestures of love, small at first and then awesome, Julie recognizes that love cannot die, that her goodness, her natural impulse to love cannot be suppressed. She opens again to the experience of being loved and of loving, and in this experience she finds salvation. The conclusion of Film Blue, one of the most powerful spiritual moments I know of in cinema, is perhaps the clearest statement of the Christian principles that inform Kieslowski’s films: a montage of visual images of the moral resurrection to love of Julie accompanied on the soundtrack by a piece of music she has created and by the words she has added to the music, the words of St. Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13, “For if I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels ... and do not have love, I am nothing.” The words, sung in the koiné Greek of the New Testament, translated in the subtitles, 14 confer a powerful Christian focus on Film Blue; they also serve most eloquently as a fitting christian-moral coda to the ten films of the Decalogue. (*) This key note speech was presented by Proffesor Lloyd Baugh in the Seminar “Ten years without Kieslowski, ten hours with Kieslowski” in the context of the 3rd Week of Spiritual Cinema of Barcelona, November 6th-12th, 2006. 1. A minimum of research shows that such claims of orthodox faith and moral behavior have limited significance. Scorsese, for example, admits he is not a practising Catholic and scholars have radically redimensioned his so-called seminary education; given his own well-known if discrete lifestyle, Zeffirelli’s insistence on orthodox belief and moral behavior ring hollow; and, in spite of his claim that Pope John Paul II saw and approved his film–something denied by the Vatican–Mel Gibson’s schismatic traditionalist catholicism (cattolicesimo integrista scismatico) is well known. 11 3. Kieslowski on Kieslowski, edited by Danusia Stok (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 149, 150. In contrast to these statements, in another interview, Kieslowski declares: “I am not a believer. For forty years I have not entered a church.” Quoted by Tadeusz Sobolewski, “La solidarietà dei peccatori”, in Kieslowski. Edited by Malgorzata Furdal and Roberto Turigliatto (Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1989), p. 69. 4. Christopher Garbowski, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue Series: The Problems of the Protagonists and Their Self-Transcendance (Boulder: East European Monographs/New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 7. Beyond what Kieslowski might in fact believe, Garbowski speaks several times of his rejection of the Church, noting that “the director never felt himself attached with the institutional Church as such, or with Catholicism in particular,” and that “Kieslowski himself had not much use for institutional Christianity.” Pp. 6, 7. 5. Ibid., p. 7. 6. Kieslowski in an interview with Malgorzata Furdal, “Perché siamo qui?”, in Kieslowski, pp.2728. 7. Sobolewski, p. 68. 8. In “La mia Bibbia senza certezze,” p. 78. 11. In Decalogue Ten, the Man of Mystery is not present, effectively substituted by the transcendent, salvific reach of the grace of the exceptional humorous, playful tone and theme of the film and especially of its conclusion. The connection between the experience of joy and the experience of the Transcendent is made by the theologian Walter Kasper who categorizes of situations of great joy as being “disclosure situations,” in which Holy Mystery breaks into human experience and reveals itself to the subject. [The God of Jesus Christ (London: SCM Press, 1983), p.85.] Supporting the idea of Kasper though using different terminology, the sociologist Peter Berger qualifies the experience of joyful play, of laughter as “ec-static,” and as one of the “signals of transcendence” in human experience. [The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), p.60.] 12. The Man’s presence in Seven is so low-key that few critics notice him. 13. I have written a detailed analysis of the Christ-metaphor operative in Decalogue Six and in its longer and original version, A Short Film about Love. One is, “A Christ-Figure in Two Films of Kieslowski,” a chapter in my Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ Figures in Film (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997), pp. 172-184. A more detailed analysis of these films and their original script appear in a two part article in Gregorianum: “Cinematographic Variations on the ChristEvent: Three Film Texts by Krzysztof Kieslowski – Part One: A Short Film about Love,” Gregorianum 84, 3 (2003), pp. 551-583; “Cinematographic Variations on the Christ-Event: Three Film Texts by Krzysztof Kieslowski – Part Two: Decalogue Six and the Script,” Gregorianum 84, 4 (2003), pp. 919-946.