Dekalog: The Ten Commandments Part 1

I'm discovering these anew. It's been so long since I last watched them that I can't remember which ones I've seen and which ones not. I'd forgotten what a master Kieslowski is. He had the mark of a genius. The first Dekalog is devastating, it tells you more about human existence in an hour than Ben Affleck's entire career. Absolutely mind-blowing.

I had to look up the Ten Commandments and even then it's rather more confusing than you'd assume, as different religious traditions assign different numbers to different commandments, but the general gist of the first is "I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other Gods before me". Kieslowski moulds this into the tussle between science and religion, between the reasoned measurements of the computers Pavel and his father are fascinated by and the unpredictability of the weather, the randomness of probability. I fear to say more unless I give it away, but it's completely riveting cinema.

I've been dipping in and out of Robert McKee's infamous Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting recently and one particular passage sticks in my mind. He says that part of a successful screenplay is managing to unearth a "universally human experience, then [wrapping it into] a unique, culture-specific expression". If ever this idea was born out in film, then this is it. The snow-covered, wind-battered Communist tower blocks of 80s Poland could only be of that time and place, the dominance of white and grey, the restrained pallet, but those archetypal themes of faith and belief, of youthful wonder and questioning, could be set down anywhere in the world.