Lately I've been urged by letter writers and emailers from around the state (and possibly from as far away as Nizhny Novgorod) to stick to writing about movies. Well, all right. Here's a column about the movies.
Well, sort of. It's actually about a series that first appeared on Polish television in 1989. Maybe the best television ever made.
That show was called Dekalog, and it comprised 10 one-hour episodes, each written by the great Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Kieslowski wrote the series with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a lawyer he'd met in 1982 when Piesiewicz was the legal adviser to the anti-Communist trade union Solidarity. Kieslowski was planning a documentary about the political show trials that were taking place in Poland at the time; he asked Piesiewicz for his help because he had defended several opponents of the Communist regime in these spectacles.
Piesiewicz agreed, but told the director he didn't think a film constrained by the conventions of journalism could effectively get at the moral truth of the judicial system, and both he and Kieslowski worried that their presence at these trials might make things worse for the accused. So they settled on a fictional story instead about a female literary translator (whose most recent project is "the Orwell") whose lawyer husband--like Piesiewicz, a defender of political dissidents--dies suddenly, leaving her to find someone to carry on with a particularly difficult open case involving a young union leader.
The film, No End, was released in 1985. While it has come to be regarded as a fine, flawed film--and an antecedent to Kieslowski's 1993 film Blue, which it resembles in theme and structure--at the time no one in Poland seemed to like it very much. The government was naturally annoyed. The opposition complained that it was too soft and compromised. The Catholic Church condemned it as immoral.
During the controversy the collaborators ran into each other in the rain. After commiserating for a moment, Piesiewicz, who'd recently seen a 15th-century artwork depicting the Ten Commandments through contemporary scenes, muttered something about making a film about the Commandments.
Kieslowski thought this a splendid idea, and soon the two were collaborating again. They set the show in modern Poland with all of the stories involving characters living in the same drab Warsaw apartment house. Characters who are at the center of one story might (or might not) turn up again as bit players in other stories. While there are 10 episodes, and each film uses one of the Commandments as an epigraph, Kieslowski seems more interested in the moral investigation of divine law in the post-moral atmosphere of socialist Poland than in law or lesson-giving. The modern moral fables they present do not refer directly to biblical text or apply theological interpretations.
There is an ordinariness to each of these narratives--the idea was that the camera might have chosen any given protagonist at random--yet the stories are highly eventful. People are killed, suicide is attempted, love and affection deepen and dissolve. It is a vivid yet subtle soap opera that allows us the most remarkable sensation of believing what we are watching is real. (Maybe it helps that these actors--some of them famous in Poland--are largely unknown in the West.) There's an unnamed mute character who appears in various roles in eight of the 10 episodes (he was supposed to be included in a ninth episode but technical problems caused his scene to be cut). He has different jobs--a homeless man, a bus driver, a construction worker, a student--and shows up at key moments to gaze upon the conflicted main character. Sometimes he looks directly into the camera, but he never intervenes. Some people think he's an angel.
Despite its episodic nature, it's a cohesive work that's probably best watched in order, in as few sittings as possible. But a 10-hour film is an unwieldy proposition; while Dekalog might seem tailor-made for HBO or Netflix, the early '90s offered no such distribution models. As a result, it didn't become commercially available in this country until 2000 when Chicago-based Facets Multi-media released it on five videotapes. Next month the Criterion Collection is releasing it on Blu-ray. Suggested retail is $99.95; the street price is $79.95. (If you're buying a bunch of copies, you might be able to get an even lower institutional deal.)
State Sen. Jason Rapert raised more than $18,000 in private funds to erect a three-ton monument to the Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol. Rapert sponsored a bill that allowed for such a monument to be erected on the grounds, but Secretary of State Mark Martin and an advisory committee are still mulling it over. There's a real question as to the constitutionality of erecting a religious memorial at the Capitol, and if the monument goes up lawsuits are likely.
And it costs money to defend lawsuits.
It's also difficult to see how the state could accept one religious monument while rejecting others. Already one group is causing mischief. The Satanic Temple is proposing that a statue of Baphomet ("a goat-headed, angel-winged, androgynous creature first rendered in its most widely recognized form by occult historian Eliphas Levi in the 19th century") be placed near the Commandments memorial.
Maybe it's unlikely the monument will ever be erected at the Capitol; the whole episode seems contrived to draw out the American Civil Liberties Union and other freethinkers so that political points might be scored with the senator's base. The point is less the erection of a three-ton Decalogue than the continued political brand-building of a minor figure who harbors big ambitions. If the state defends the monument in court, the money it spends will, among some constituents anyway, burnish Rapert's self-styled image as a defender of the faith. A cynic might suspect he's doing this for the publicity.
How many Blu-ray copies of Kieslowski's Dekalog could the money spent on Rapert's Decalogue have provided Arkansas schools and libraries? The math is easy--more than 200, even if you don't cut a deal. And our high school students would benefit more from watching great moral art than a field trip to the Capitol to look at a garden of idols and cenotaphs.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 08/21/2016