Dekalog (1989, Krzysztof Kieślowski)
Tuesday 13th, Thursday 15th and Friday 16th of February, Richard Hoggart Building cinema
Join us during reading week, on Tuesday the 13th, Thursday the 15th and Friday the 16th of February, for a special screening of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1989 masterpiece Dekalog, which the Criterion Collection calls “one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements in visual storytelling”. All ten parts of the series will be shown in Goldsmiths cinema in the highest available quality (the 4K restoration on BluRay) with English subtitles.
Note: these are ten standalone films, not a continuous narrative, and this is not a series you need to watch in order (in fact, Kieślowski encouraged watching the films in a random order to notice new thematic connections). So you don’t need to come to all or even most of the screenings to enjoy it. If you can only make one or two films, come and see them – it might make you want to see the rest.
This event is rescheduled from mid-December when we were unable to put it on due to illness. The schedule is as follows:
Tuesday 13th, 1-4:45pm: 1pm - doors open; 1:15pm - Part One; 2:15pm - 15-minute break; 2:30pm - Part Two; 3:30pm - 15 minute break; 3:45pm - Part Three; 4:45pm - finish.
Thursday 15th, 1-6pm: 1pm - doors open; 1:15pm - Part Four; 2:15pm - 15-minute break; 2:30pm - Part Five; 3:30pm - 15 minute break; 3:45pm - Part Six; 4:45pm - 15 minute break; 5pm - Part Seven; 6pm - finish.
Friday 16th, 1-4:45pm: 1pm - doors open; 1:15pm - Part Eight; 2:15pm - 15-minute break, 2:30pm - Part Nine; 3:30pm - 15 minute break; 3:45pm - Part Ten; 4:45pm - finish.
Dekalog is a series of ten one-hour films, inspired and loosely based on the Ten Commandments, which Kieślowski made for Polish television in 1989. Set in an austere housing project in 1980s, late-Communist Poland, each film centers on the moral dilemmas and existential questions faced by its characters. Although Kieślowski is perhaps best known today for the Three Colours trilogy (1993-94), recently re-released in a 4K restoration, Dekalog stands as his masterpiece.
One famous admirer of the series was Stanley Kubrick, who is reported to have considered it the only “film masterpiece” he had ever seen. He wrote in his foreword to the published screenplays that Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz “have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.”
To see how unlikely you are to be disappointed, read some of the user reviews on Letterboxd. To read more about Kieślowski, read The Guardian’s 1996 obituary after his untimely death at the age of 54. To read a long essay about the series, see Paul Coates’s essay for the Criterion release, ““And So On”: Kieślowski’s Dekalog and the Metaphysics of the Everyday”. To read a long profile of Kieślowski, see Doug Cummings’s 2003 piece for Senses of Cinema.