Jackie Lentz: Blog #1 Decalogue

Midrash is the understanding of meaning within a film that fills the holes of allusions to other ideas. Midrash is an entirely new and fully incorporated element of Kieslowski’s films. In the first film we watched about the first commandment of the Bible, thou shalt not have any other gods before me, a father who teaches at a local university and is well versed in electronics and physics determines with his son that the lake outside their apartment should be frozen enough to skate on. There is an incident on the lake in the afternoon and it is only till night fall that the father learns that his son is one of two boys who fell into the frozen lake and died. The lesson portrayed in this film is that faith in technology before faith in divinity will lead only to heartbreak. In the film Kieslowski utilizes the computer to work as a symbol to illustrate the lesson. The trust in the computer’s calculation is the remez of what is being portrayed, which is the deep meaning behind the faith in technology. However, it is the responses outside of the realm of programming that first hints at the idea that unlike the false idols of the Bible such as Ba’al, this false idol seems to communicate much like God and the burning bush. The computer responds to the boy’s questions, and while it may not be able to answer them the significance lies in the lack of actual technology to be able to respond to questions. This forces the audience to question whether the faith put into this machine is result of their own adoration and obsession with technology or because it was tangible whereas God was not. The second film depicts the commandment, thou shalt not kill, in which a man meticulously calculates killing a random taxi driver, who is portrayed as a jerk, and as a result is sentenced to and put to death by the state. The feelings after each of the films are incredibly different. The first leaves the audience heartbroken and sad whilst the other extracts mixed emotions. The second film can either make the audience feel justice was done or repulsed at the continuation of slaughter for slaughter. The feelings relate back to the commandments themselves, forcing the audience to reflect on what we believed could be the worst consequence for breaking a commandment. The killing for killing is understandable but the loss of a child for believing in something new makes the audience stop for a moment to weigh the gravity of what we all have at stake. The hell that is deduced from that first film bridges the concepts of eternal punishment that is not illustrated or explained but still left in the audience’s mind.