Dekalog (Parts 1-5) VHSPAL

Made for Polish television but shown in cinemas around the world, these ten hour-long existential essays from the director Krzysztof Kieslowski - each one a modern... Read on

Made for Polish television but shown in cinemas around the world, these ten hour-long existential essays from the director Krzysztof Kieslowski - each one a modern interpretation of a Biblical commandment - cram the intensity (and some of the thematic material) of one of his later 90-minute Three Colours movies into a third of the time.
As you’d expect from a set of ten films, they cover a lot of ground between them, with moments for fans of sci-fi (Dekalog One), tug-of-love drama (Dekalog Seven), car chases (Dekalog Three), stamp-collecting black comedy (Dekalog Ten) and West Bromwich Albion (Dekalog Five). The flippant viewer can have fun trying to guess which tale represents which moral, obvious in the case of the shorter Short Film About Killing, but much less so in the covetous - and surely not adulterous - Dekalog Six.
The films themselves aren’t especially preachy, but then they’re not frivolous either, with sections of wordless power that express a great and justifiable faith in their Preisner scores and Kieslowski’s eye for a rich visual motif: even on as wonderfully flashy a medium as DVD, this Dekalog remains as graven and as reverent as the stone tablet handed down to Moses himself.
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