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The fact that Piketty is French doesn’t particularly matter to most articles that introduce him this way: granted some of his work focused on the French economy and most of his books and articles were published in French before English translations, but this rarely affects the context. Ewa tries to breastfeed Ania without any milk. Wojtek tells Majka that Ania needs a home with milk. A nameless character played by Polish actor Artur Barciś appears in all but episodes 7 and 10. He observes the main characters at key moments, and never intervenes. This magical-realist film of eight vignettes is a feast for the eyes. Inspired by the director’s own nighttime visions, along with stories from Japanese folklore, it's a visually sumptuous journey through Akira’s imagination. A young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts the ghosts of the war dead; a power plant meltdown smothers a seaside landscape in radioactive fumes.
Cast: Henryk Baranowski, Wojciech Klata, Maja Komorowska, Artur Barcis, Maria Gladkowska, Ewa Kania This list was criticised on publication (not least by The Economist itself a few days later) for including no women and being overly academic. ↩︎ The 100 Best Films of World Cinema | 36. Dekalog". Empire. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Dekalog: One" revolves around the story of a university professor and his young son living a life tethered to the certainties of science and mathematics. The professor believes in the power of logic and computation, considering them the guiding lights of existence. But the universe has its script, and the realms of certainty and belief collide, unraveling a tragic tapestry that explores the paradoxes of faith, loss, and the pursuit of truth. The Main Characters Krzysztof Kieślowski's Acclaimed Films". They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?. Archived from the original on 11 April 2020 . Retrieved 30 December 2016.Over the morning I ran just over 30 KM, 20 of which were between the embassies. My Apple Watch reports that I’ve completed my move ring 720%. I wonder if I needn’t move for the rest of the week. I taught a class on “The Decalogue” a few years ago, using tapes from England, and found that we lost a lot of time trying to match up the films and the commandments. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation; some films touch on more than one commandment, and others involve the whole ethical system suggested by the commandments. These are not simplistic illustrations of the rules, but stories that involve real people in the complexities of real problems. Thanks to some tight editing to get them under the 10,000 word limit, both theses came to exactly 9,989 words. I jog north through Kensington to Estonia, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. A Dutch guard notices me, but he’s disinterested. I navigate to Greece through Holland Park using my phone and the printed maps I have with me. The embassy is at the top of the hill. I’m not happy, but I am forgiving: I’m close to the end now.
The way this effort to map limits builds upon film’s normal preoccupation with the parameters of a shot or scene becomes apparent in Dekalog: Eight’s class discussion of the complex anecdote underlying Dekalog: Two—Dorota, previously unable to conceive and fearing the consequences of her pregnancy’s testimony to an affair, feels she can bring it to term only if her husband dies of the cancer afflicting him, and therefore importunes his doctor to tell her whether this will happen—and a story of a child’s wartime abandonment. Ethics professor Zofia concludes the class discussion by stating, “We’ve taken this far enough.” Is this simply because the class has run out of time—it breaks up a moment later—or has the issue genuinely run its course? The question becomes pointed when Zofia later mentions the need to think things through to the end—as if they may not arrive there of their own accord. Good defaults are essential to nudging: if we automatically fall down “the right path” then we’re maximising P(success | implementation) because we don’t need to do anything differently once we’ve implemented the change. By making the change easy, we maximise P(implementation). Ten commandments. 10 episodes. 10 hours. When it first aired on Polish television in 1989, decades before long-form filmmaking would come to be regarded as the last bastion of auteurism, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog” was one of the most immense undertakings the cinema had ever seen. There had been longer works, and more lavishly financed ones — even when accounting for inflation, “Dekalog” would qualify as a micro-budget project — but the existential girth of Kieślowski’s magnum opus immediately made it feel like a monolith among molehills. While the movies are based upon the Ten Commandments, they are not simple morality tales and illustrations. Kieslowski and his co-writer, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, create meditations that connect both intellectually and emotionally with the commandments instead. They explore the commandments' themes with the head and the heart. One great example is the first movie, in which a parent and his child use a computer to predict the freezing rate of a pond. Casting the computer and human knowledge as false Gods is not a new or unique idea, but in Kieslowski's hands, the idea expands and fills not only the mind but the heart. Man, I wish I had the vocabulary to express what moves in me every time I watch any one of these films.
The series was conceived when screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who had seen a 15th-century artwork illustrating the Commandments in scenes from that time period, suggested the idea of a modern equivalent. Filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski was interested in the philosophical challenge, and also wanted to use the series as a portrait of the hardships of Polish society, while deliberately avoiding the political issues he had depicted in earlier films. He originally meant to hire ten different directors, but decided to direct the films himself. He used a different cinematographer for each episode except III and IX, in both of which Piotr Sobociński was director of photography. [10] Lithuania is on Vauxhaul Bridge Road. Not counting my warm-up jog I’ve already covered 10km but I’ve not even covered half the embassies. The road is the busiest yet and the pollution is getting to me. Dekalog ( pronounced [dɛˈkalɔg], also known as Dekalog: The Ten Commandments and The Decalogue) is a 1989 Polish drama television miniseries directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski [2] and co-written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. [3] It consists of ten one-hour films, inspired by the decalogue of the Ten Commandments. [4] Each short film explores characters facing one or several moral or ethical dilemmas as they live in an austere housing project in 1980s Poland. Individual documentaries may indeed be scripted and structured to prove a point, but the form has an a priori openness to the unexpected, the uncontrolled, even the unreadable. Reality can transfix, however uncertain its meaning—or precisely because uncertainty nags like a riddle one feels it might be possible to solve. If the young man is the series’ most complete embodiment of the element of opacity in reality, its resistance to interpretation, Dekalog: Four, with its uncertainty over just what Anka may or may not have done with the letter around which it revolves, may be its fullest enactment. Kieślowski’s account of the young man’s genesis has the studio’s literary director, Witek Zalewski, worrying that the initial scripts were missing something—an absence remedied, paradoxically, by rendering it palpable, through this figure. He is the placeholder for an unknown, the reality to which fiction can respond by depositing speculation around it, as the sand grain provokes the oyster to deposit the pearl that obscures it. The result can be a form of the ambiguity prized by the great French film theorist and critic André Bazin, for whom photography disclosed “the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know” and was “an hallucination that is also a fact.” Is the young man mourning Paweł at the series’ start, or simply brushing smoke from his eyes? His direct look at the camera, like that of an enigmatically silent documentary interviewee, drives a wedge into our own, spectatorial world, opening it up to realities visible, at most, through a glass darkly. Thomas Piketty’s work on income inequality is much cited and discussed; he is considered one of the most influential living economists. I’ve seen his name crop up a lot recently, especially in articles about the economy after coronavirus. However, there’s just one problem: journalists can’t seem to resist mentioning that he’s the “ French economist Thomas Piketty”.
In some episodes the connection is obvious: I doubt anyone would miss “thou shalt not commit adultery” in Dekalog: Six or “thou shalt not cover thy neighbour’s wife” from Dekalog: Nine. Artur Barciś appears as a silent, angelic character in most of the episodes, offering glaring warnings to characters as they are on the precipice of breaking a commandment. The way A Short Film About Love moves from realism to metaphysics may be emblematic of the shape of Kieślowski’s career. Graduating from Poland’s famous Łódź film school amid the turmoil of the late 1960s—which saw student protests and a government anti-Semitic campaign, then working-class protests over rising prices that culminated in the unseating of Party First Secretary Władysław Gomułka—Kieślowski, throughout the subsequent decade, would often define his project as one of describing the world. Along with various other artists associated with the seventies Young Culture movement, he argued that Polish reality required description before it could be changed. Observational (“fly-on-the-wall”) and interactive (“talking-head”) documentary filmmaking, which had come to the fore in the sixties, were particularly well suited to this task, and Kieślowski’s documentaries would all fall into one or the other of these categories; indeed, he would even, in 1980, call one of his most haunting films Talking Heads (he liked self-deprecating but accurate titles: cf. A Short Film About Killing). His later move away from documentary is often attributed to his growing fear of harming his subjects through their candid self-revelations, some of which he provoked. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he would resist television transmission of the documentary From a Night Porter’s Point of View (1977),whose interviewed subject voices his support for public hangings. Kieślowski’s quarrel, continued by fictional means in Dekalog: Five, was less with the protagonist than with the punitive worldview the porter exemplified. But if the move toward fiction seemed to end the project of description, an overlooked statement in Kieślowski on Kieślowski casts it rather as that project’s logical next step: “Only when you describe something can you start speculating about it.” This is most obviously the case in Blind Chance (1981), made as his move to fiction was consummated, though shelved at the time by the authorities, where one contemporary character’s experience of three contrasting political and apolitical lives prompts the question (critics posed it again and again) whether any is the “true” one. Fiction is the speculation that follows from description, its question being, What is it that lies within? I’m a little melancholic to close this chapter of my life. I am, however, incredibly grateful for the experience and to the people who supported me along the way. I reach the Latvian Embassy first and immediately deviate from the route I planned (it would’ve been number 3). The idea and the route for this run emerged months ago. I put it off: I knew that jogging to every EU embassy in London would be close to a half marathon. 27 stops, with navigation between them, was going to take its toll too.Maja Komorowska - Irena: Krzysztof's sister, she deeply believes in God and does not understand her brother much but they respect each other and have in common their love for little Paweł. According to Edward Kłosiński, who filmed Blanc ( Three Colours: White, 1994) and Dekalog, dwa ( The Decalogue 2), Kieslowski did not believe “That the camera conveys ideas…. [Instead, t]he acting is what influences style.” See “White: Edward Kłosiński”, Three Colors, Blu-Ray, Booklet, Criterion Collection, New York, p. 68. a b "The Critics on The Decalogue". Facets. Archived from the original on 24 July 2010 . Retrieved 13 May 2020. Mayfair and Marylebone are built on a grid around squares created by wealthy landowners in the Georgian era. Navigation is easy and it takes me no effort to find Italy in Grovesnor Square. I often jog around this corner of the West End. Malta and Cyprus aren’t far. I jog around St James’s Park to Slovenia.
Denmark is my favourite. The building, which also houses the Icelandic embassy, starkly contrasts with just about everything else on Sloane Street. Almost all other Belgravia embassies are white houses with pillared porches. Its size surprises me: Denmark has a population of less than 6 million. Other larger countries have much smaller embassies.
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Why The Decalogue Still Matters After Twenty Years". HuffPost. 23 June 2008. Archived from the original on 26 December 2021 . Retrieved 26 December 2021.
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