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Arava Desert international Film Festival Production
Decalogue:
Point Of View
Curator: Hannah Rothschild
Written by Mikołaj Jazdon
Photographed by Piotr Jaxa
for The Map of The Decalogue
Following are paragraphs from The Decalogue Map project. They present elaborated context about the images and the movies. You are invited to start with the first photo hanging to the left of the front door.
Located between Inflancka and Dzika Streets, this housing complex was built in the 1970s using prefabricated slabs of reinforced-steel concrete. Each building was assembled, floor by floor, from one-story-high, H-shaped panels. Similar buildings were constructed in Warsaw’s Służew nad Dolinką neighborhood, which also served as a location for scenes in The Decalogue.
Decalogue One
In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue, the modern world—one in which people of different generations and professions cross paths, each torn by different passions, and each confronting lesser or greater universal problems in their daily lives—is manifested in a neighborhood of prefabricated apartment buildings composed of concrete panels. The director had attempted, since the early 1970s, to produce a short documentary about the apartment complex—a new urban borough rising gradually out of a barren construction site, and designed in one of the typical styles of twentieth-century European architecture. His initial intention was to shoot this six-minute film from one vantage point over the course of several years, concluding with a close-up of one window, showing a young man and woman meeting in an apartment. This would be followed by a sequence depicting the subsequent stages of their lives: their first kiss, pregnancy, and, finally, the new parents enjoying breakfast with their kids. The film would conclude with the camera drawing back to a wide shot of the housing complex. As the film, titled Narodziny (Birth), drew closer to production, Kieślowski began scouting for the best location. His shortlist contained five new residential neighborhoods under construction in Warsaw: Stegny, Służew, Marymont, Ursynów, and the complex bounded by Stawka, Dzika, and Inflancka Streets. The last location struck him as the most promising. Though the film was ultimately never produced, the Inflancka neighborhood provided much of the residential setting for Decalogue One and later episodes in the series.
This body of water was artificially created in 1935 by damming up the Wystawowy (Exhibition) Canal. It is located between the neighborhoods of Gocław and Saska Kępa, in what is likely a former channel of the Vistula river.
Decalogue One
The lake is the location of the central and most dramatic event of the first episode. On a cold winter’s afternoon, several boys from the nearby apartment buildings, including the teenage boy Paweł (Wojciech Klata), fall through the ice and drown. Krzysztof (Henryk Baranowski) watches as scuba divers retrieve his son’s lifeless body from the icy waters. The father’s stable, predictable, “calculable” world suddenly comes crashing down. This event, featured on the first pages of the Decalogue screenplay, was inspired by Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who endured a nerve-racking winter afternoon in the early 1980s when his son was very late coming home from the skating rink set up on a neighborhood pond. It was an emotional evening, one that left an indelible mark in his memory: the image of a father waiting for his son, as the family began praying for the boy’s safe return. The role of the father was played by Henryk Baranowski, a theater director and friend of Kieślowski’s. The director of The Decalogue considered performing the part himself at first, but after shooting a few test scenes and consulting with the film crew, he abandoned the idea. Another boy was initially chosen for the role of Paweł, but the director recast the part after a few days, dissatisfied with the boy’s performance on screen. The young actor was replaced by Wojtek Klata, and Kieślowski reshot the scenes with the new cast member.
The Church of the Ascension is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Ursynów, commonly known as Warsaw’s “bedroom neighborhood.” The original plans for the surrounding neighborhood, which were drawn up during the People’s Republic of Poland, did not call for any places of worship. However, in the latter half of the 1970s, church authorities decided to establish a parish in this location. The unfinished church was opened to the faithful in May of 1989.
Decalogue One
Krzysztof, the lead character in the film, played by Henry Baranowski, enters an empty, candle-lit church on the darkest evening of his life. His only son has just drowned, no more than a few dozen meters from where he now stands. Expressing his deep-seated refusal to accept the tragedy that has just befallen him, the man topples the makeshift altar set up in the newly built church. The wax from a fallen candle drips onto the visage of Our Lady of Częstochowa, flowing down her cheeks like tears. The copy of the venerated icon from the Jasna Góra Monastery reminds us that the tragic events take place in Poland, where the Black Madonna plays an important historical role.
The café at the European Hotel was a popular meeting place in Poland before 1989, and foreign guests would often be invited there. It was frequented by intellectuals and artists associated with the nearby Academy of Fine Arts, as well as members of Warsaw’s criminal underground. The café was a favorite location for filmmakers to shoot “big city” scenes.
Decalogue Two
At a hotel café, the main character Dorota (Krystyna Janda) meets with a young man (Aleksander Trąbczyński) dispatched by her lover, who is currently on tour abroad.
Decalogue Five
Two of the characters pay simultaneous yet separate visits to this café: Jacek Łazar (Mirosław Baka), the twenty-year-old drifter who is about to commit a crime, and Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz), his future public defender, who has come to celebrate passing the bar exam.
The left (west) bank of the Vistula—seen in Decalogue Four from Ania’s vantage point on the right bank—is largely developed and lined with concrete. The river’s east bank has mostly retained its natural form.
Decalogue Four
Anna (Adrianna Biedrzyńska) pulls out an envelope marked, “Open after my death.” The only witness to her furtive actions is the mysterious man (Artur Barciś) paddling a kayak over from the opposite bank. This scene’s silent witness (whose presence is observed in other episodes) resembles Charon, the mythological ferryman who carried the souls of the dead across the River Styx. He seems to remind us that Ania will only gain the right to open the mysterious envelope after the death of her dad. Disobeying her mother’s wishes, Ania goes against the will of her living father (Janusz Gajos) and violates a taboo. The secrets are anxiously defended by the Angel Barciś, who rushes down the river in his boat, as if sent from the world beyond to prevent the daughter from breaking this taboo. Like a divine sword, his white boat cuts through the scene, and through our own confusion.
One of the most recognizable and impressive boulevards in Warsaw’s historical center, Krakowskie Przedmieście, stretches approximately 1.1 kilometers from the Castle Square to the statue of Nicolaus Copernicus, forming the northern part of the Royal Route. Its current name is a reference to Krakow, Poland’s former capital, to which the boulevard once led.
Decalogue Five
At this location, Jacek Łazar wanders around Krakowskie Przedmieście as he prepares to commit his heinous crime. He passes a group of soccer hooligans and witnesses a brutal beating. He himself wreaks havoc by shoving a young man in a public restroom, and chasing away a flock of pigeons being fed by an elderly woman.
The building at 12 Noakowski Street was constructed in 1912 in a modern architectural style. During World War II, its residents built a chapel; the statue of the Virgin Mary still stands in the interior courtyard.
Decalogue Eight
The inner courtyard of this building and its Virgin Mary figurine bear silent witness to history. This is one of the few locations in The Decalogue that is so intricately tied to a distant, bygone time—it also appears in the series’ only flashback scene. On a dark night in 1943, in German-occupied Warsaw, a Jewish girl is led to one of the apartments in this building, seeking refuge. Kieślowski based this plot line on an autobiographical story relayed to him by Hanna Krall, a famous writer and author of numerous works of non-fiction about the Holocaust. The two heroines of Decalogue Eight (Maria Kościałkowska and Teresa Marczewska) visit the building where their paths crossed on that night during wartime. The structure bears the scars of Warsaw’s post-war history, when old homes were unmaintained for years, gradually falling into disrepair, and the spacious pre-war apartments were subdivided into smaller units. The co-author of the screenplay, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a lawyer, contributed to this story the theme of “unimputable guilt”: the feeling experienced by people who, like his mother, witness a crime but are powerless to intervene. During the Second World War, Piesiewicz’s mother saw an SS officer march a young Jewish woman and her child out of their home. He tore the baby from her arms and heaved it against a wall, dashing its little head on the bricks, and then tossed the body onto the truck, where the poor mother had been herded along with other detainees. Piesiewicz’s mother told him this story many times throughout her life, repeatedly revisiting and reliving the memory of the events she had witnessed from the window.
Located in the Warsaw neighborhood of Targówek, the Bródno Hospital complex comprises twelve buildings. It was officially opened on January 22, 1981.
Decalogue Nine
Roman (Piotr Machalica), a cardiac surgeon, meets a young singer, Ola (Jolanta Piętek), who is in the hospital awaiting heart surgery. Her ability to sing hinges on the success of the procedure. The pursuit of a vocal career is more her mother’s ambition than her own, but after the operation Ola changes her outlook on life, discovering her desire to sing and be heard. Kieślowski explores the theme of a talented singer suffering from a heart condition in greater depth in his film, The Double Life of Veronique. Both films feature the voice of the same singer Elżbieta Towarnicka. Ola sings to music composed by Van den Budenmayer, whose work is also heard in the movie about two Veroniques and in Three Colours: Blue. The eighteenth-century Dutch composer is a fictional character; his name is an artistic pseudonym used by Zbigniew Preisner, who wrote the music for The Decalogue, and authored the scores of the Polish director’s later films. The collaboration between Kieślowski, Preisner, and Piesiewicz began with the film No End and continued until the filmmaker’s death. In 1998, Preisner composed Requiem for My Friend, dedicating the piece to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The trope of an artist struggling with various limitations—for example, the story of the young singer in Decalogue Nine—appears in some of Kieślowski’s earlier films: the documentary, Seven Women of Different Ages, and the feature, Camera Buff.
Designed by Józef Handzelewicz, this early modernist building was constructed in 1922–23. After its destruction during World War II, it was rebuilt in 1961, one floor shorter than before, to serve as the main office of the Polish Post.
Decalogue Ten
At the post office, Jerzy buys stamps from a counter clerk (Tomek, the main character in Decalogue Six, played by Olaf Lubaszenko). As it turns out, despite all the trouble the brothers went through after inheriting the stamp collection left by “Korzeń” (their late father’s nom de guerre), they still have a deep passion for philately. Stamp collecting was one of the most popular hobbies in late-twentieth-century Poland. Collectors’ clubs, like the one frequented by the characters’ father, cropped up all over the country. One of them was featured in the short documentary, In the Club (1963), by Kazimierz Karabasz, Kieślowski’s film school professor. Tadeusz Pałka, of the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw (where Kieślowski and Karabasz also worked), produced a short documentary in 1975, titled, The Collector, about an award-winning philatelist who amassed his collection at the cost of subjecting his wife and sons to serious hardship. Even now, in the twenty-first century, stamps continue to provoke a strong desire for collectorship. Twenty years after the episode was shot, a historic set of stamps priced at several million złoty was stolen from the Post and Telecommunications Museum in Wrocław. The brazen thieves replaced the pilfered items with high-quality counterfeits. When Quentin Tarantino was called up to accept the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1995 Oscar ceremony, he leaned over to Krzysztof Piesiewicz (who, with Kieślowski, was co-nominated for the screenplay of Three Colours: Red) and said: “I learned how to write screenplays by watching Decalogue Ten.”
The public, non-denominational Northern Cemetery is the biggest burial ground in the city of Warsaw and one of the largest in all of Europe, covering a total area of 143 hectares. The land was set aside in the 1960s at the northern edge of the city and partially in the village of Wołka Węglowa, which is why it is commonly referred to as the “Wólka Cemetery.”
Decalogue Ten
The funeral scene, which was filmed at the largest cemetery in Warsaw (and probably one of the largest in all of Europe), is essentially the start of a story about heirs and inheritance. One of the inspirations for the stories in The Decalogue is The Ten Commandments, a fifteenth-century altarpiece that the co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz saw during a school field trip to the National Museum in Warsaw. Years later, he told Kieślowski about the artwork, which illustrates the final commandment with a depiction of mourners in prayer.