The Decalogue (TV Mini Series) Dekalog, osiem (1989) User Reviews

'Dekalog': Part 8- The difficulties of truth amid evil and the sanctity of truth

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 12 February 2017]

'Dekalog' is a towering achievement and a televisual masterpiece that puts many feature films to shame, also pulling off a concept of great ambition brilliantly. Although a big admirer of Krzysztof Kieślowski (a gifted director taken from us too early), and who has yet to be disappointed by him, to me 'Dekalog' and 'Three Colours: Red' sees him at his best.

All of 'Dekalog's' episodes have so many great things, and it is an example of none of the lesser episodes being bad. This is testament to the high quality of 'Dekalog' as an overall whole and how brilliant the best episodes are.

Episode 8 may be one of the weaker 'Dekalog' episodes, but it is still very good. With it being the simplest of all ten stories, it is not quite as thematically rich or as emotionally impactful as some of the others, and the other commandments explored with a little more naturalness.

Every single one of 'Dekalog's' episodes are exceptionally well made. The production values in Episode 8 are as ever atmosphere-enhancing, beautiful and haunting to look at and fascinating, definitely cannot be faulted on the technical front. The direction is quietly unobtrusive, intelligently paced and never too heavy, and the music is suitably intricate.

The characters are still interesting and their interactions and relationships with each other resonate. Even though most of the other episodes are richer thematically, Episode 8's themes are still explored intelligently and without any preachiness and there are some very atmospheric and moving moments (just not quite as much as the previous episodes). The acting is superb as to be expected, with complexity and nuances by the bucket-load.

To conclude, may be one of the weaker 'Dekalog' episodes but it is still very good. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Zofia's guilt

[alix_no · 7/10 · 10 March 2013]

Kieslowski's Dekalog are stories of human motivations, the repercussions of human instinct and above all god's impact on our decisions. Dekalog VIII fit in well with the series, it's messages were clearly communicated and the performances were great but I think that the film by itself wouldn't be able to hold up. I feel that Dekalog VIII was a weak contribution.

The story was weak in comparison to the other Dekalogs and it lacked the emotional punch of the other films. The part of the film I found most interesting was Zofia's meeting with the contortionist. I believe that this scene is metaphorical for the futility of trying to change what had happened to Elzbieta and the guilt will stay with Zofia forever. Other than the commandment it is based on the theme of this film is guilt and I think that was what I didn't like about the film. Zofia let Elzbieta in her life out of guilt and Zofia's motivations were selfish after the war. Guilt crippled Zofia's life and she was trying to make up for it by teaching economics,teaching people to become better humans. Elzbieta's arrival back into Zofia's life was her redemption. Elzbieta was showered with kindness and answers by Zofia and all the help that Elzbieta needed. Was this because of the goodness that was inside everyone as Zofia put it or was this because Zofia wanted to feel better about herself? I believe in the latter. I think if I re-watched this I would definitely like it and understand it more but as it stands this is my least favourite Dekalog. As always Kieslowki's direction really makes the film and shows a unique vision of these characters. It is worth watching. 7.5/10

Simple and Terrific

[sfuss · 10/10 · 11 March 2000]

With a minimum of histrionics, this film tells a simple story about the legacy of the holocaust in Poland.

A college professor who once turned away a little Jewish girl who sought refuge is confronted by that same girl -- now in her forties -- and must explain to her the real reason for turning her away. While the two women are able to forge a deep friendship, the man (a tailor) who risked his life to try and save the girl has become, with time, too closed off to allow her to form any sort of bond with him. The film's last image, of the lonely tailor looking out the window of his shop to see the professor and her friend laughing together, has the same straight forward and unassuming emotional wallop that ends many of Kieslowski's films.

This may be the best fictional film ever made about the holocaust.

A woman haunted by the memories of her unhappy childhood.

[Aquilant · 10/10 · 15 April 2005]

Dekalog 8 introduces a debate about a situation described in the second episode of the series, with regard to some interesting researches about thematic morals made in an unadorned lecture hall. As in a game of mirrors, Kieslowski's magical poetry proposes subtle allusions, references, previous solutions analysed under different points of view.

The analysis of Elzbieta's personal story framed within the context of her restless past and recalled in the light of her present time made of painful and unavoidable confrontations proposes the harassing thought about our duty to God, about our moral obligations towards the Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour". Is it possible to be merciful to our fellowmen even at the risk of violating the dictates of divine commandments? Are we allowed to help people even if we are aware about the incompatibility between the ethical principles applied to the evidences of religion and the intention of "bearing false witness against our neighbour" to a good purpose? Is it really possible to give up the idea of getting out of the clutches of the Nazi police a six-year-old Jewish child in the desperate need of a certificate of baptism only on account of moral and religious scruples? The dramatic explanation between Elzbieta, haunted by the memories of her unhappy childhood, and Zofia, the elder woman who refused to give her a passport to safety many years ago, call to our minds a sense of bewilderment and affliction.

Both of them are afraid of something going up in smoke around them and nothing escapes their remembrances of a painful past. Sad remembrances of course, because nothing hurts like the truth. Crude in the same manner as a vivisection of the soul. Conjured up with surgical precision in the coldness of an utterly impersonal ambient. Maybe only a cathartic face to face between the two women would give life to new friendly relations made of comprehension, explanations, reconciliations. Kieslowski divides all humanity into two parts: the saviors and the saved. His strict dialectics traces all the uneven steps of the story in a very subtle way. He likes to give back to human dignity its state of primitive and natural innocence, deeply upset by a pressing sense of misinterpreted obedience to the precepts of the Church.

A poignant essay on theological reconciliation

[JuguAbraham · 9/10 · 22 June 2003]

"Thou shalt not bear false witness" is the commandment in question being addressed by director Kieslowski. The anti-Jewish sentiment is merely a vehicle to study the Christian commandment threadbare. Is the concept of Christian charity second to a commandment? The film is ambiguous about the director/writer's view on this yet we suspect the director is not taking a clear stand. He does take a stand on the God within each of us--the goodness, the humane aspect of each of us is the last word.

This film is one of the few in which we seem to get a peek at the real Kieslowski. The initial parts of the film keep religion out of focus and in the background. The church/shrine at Leobowski is initially never shown in focus--you only see the lighted candles before an altar/shrine. Later in the film the Jewish girl is seen praying at the Christian site (an act confirmed later in the film through the dialogue).

The film begins with reproach of one wronged at age 6 by a "religious" Catholic who refuses to be charitable out of fear of repercussions, hiding behind the Commandment. The film ends with the main characters coming closer in a new bonding through understanding through re-evaluation of new facts and a theological reconciliation. Momentarily, even the viewer is made to suspect the Catholic woman's credibility as she presents her case to the grown-up "child". But the "wronged" child undergoes a transformation--she begins to like the woman who did not bear witness, a lonely woman whose son has left her, a remorseful woman teaching ethics.

The brilliant culmination of the film is the final presentation of the tailor's character--the man, a Christian, who was ready to save a Jewish child--who knowing everything refuses to discuss the past, present and future--a man who has evidently faced a lot of torment. He watches dispassionately the bonding between the two women as the film ends.

The elder woman anticipates the reaction of the tailor and waits outside the shop. The woman who straightens the stubborn painting that refuses to align, the woman who has lost her biological son in society, gains the understanding of the child she wronged. The goodness in man comes out in this episode of Dekalog, sometimes silently (the tailor), sometimes evocatively (the Jewish girl who prays alone after reconciling with religions and finding a different woman in the person she thought was different and inhuman).

The camera-work is not as good as in Dekalog 7, but the all performances and the minimalist music are just stunning.

However, there are questions left unanswered. What was the interruption in the classroom all about? Why was the opening scene of the child of 6 being led by an adult necessary? Why did the tailor not talk after recognizing her? Are there political metaphors here? I had the good fortune of meeting the Director 8 years before he made this film. How I wish I had met him now!

Best structured of the bunch

[Polaris_DiB · 10/10 · 31 July 2006]

One of the most dynamically dramatic episodes of the Decalogue, this particular story also holds in its dialog the key to what drives a lot of the Decalogue segments along: the study of ethics and motivations. It starts out as a discussed reference to Decalogue 2, self-reflectively mocking the attempt to create ethical drama through cancer-patients, and then leads into a much more personal (is that even possible in this series?) look into the histories of the characters involved.

The funny thing is that in this one, the drama has already past... which is necessary for connecting to it the idea of the law, "Thou shalt not bear false witness." How does one know how false witness affects negatively the life-station of the people involved could not really be considered so soon after the fact, but instead needs a lifetime of confusion and personal guilt to show an aged person already suffering her own personal hell.

What's most interesting about this one is the irony, especially of an ethics professor claiming that the key to moral absolution comes through the survival of the innocent... and yet it is the survival of a young woman who creates her strongest moral dilemma. That is why this episode is the most self-reflexive, because it cannot of itself willingly claim an absolute understanding of events and moral dilemma.

--PolarisDiB

What a shame ! ! ! Mysterious are the vagaries of human mind.

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 10/10 · 18 August 2008]

Dekalog 8: "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" is a short film which will surely move any human being with heart to tears.By making this film,one of the greatest masters of Polish cinema Kieslowski has given birth to a highly mature work of art which needs to be seen at regular intervals to fathom the true meaning of human existence found in human heart.One can learn that there is no yardstick by which greatness or wickedness of an individual,a society,a nation or a religion can be measured.Everybody has reasons to accept or decline a good action."Dekalog,Osiem" suggests that individual sense prevails sometimes over a good act.Rules have to be broken on some occasions to save precious,human lives.It is a human instinct that old memories cannot be separated from human soul.This is the reason why old memories induce people to visit places where they could have died,see a house where they were hidden,meet a person who saved a life.This short film is remarkable for its depiction of young Polish university students.It is a good sign that young generation have been shown as interested in tackling ethical and moral questions.It is hard to say whether Kieslowski had ideas about the liberation of communist Poland in his mind when he was making this film.

False

[tedg · 11 August 2006]

Everyone, and I mean everyone who is alive, should spend some time with Kieslowski. And to do it right, you need to spend time with these ten experiments.

Yes, they are experiments and they are important to the history of cinematic imagination.

They are all cowritten. The writing partner sets a knot, a dramatic tangle. Kieslowski then enters this scribble and adds cinematic reality in two ways. The first is simply the cinematic platform of storytelling. The second are a set of cinematic elaborations. Its this second bit that makes him so exciting.

They're what I call cinematic folds, but because this is the short form (the movie equivalent of short stories) they only have to be suggested. Taken together, the collection of ten short films is a few hundred loose fishooks, many of which catch you unawares.

In his "colors" work he folds these back in his long form experiments.

To make this a real experience for us and him, he does most of his work after the project begins filming. And to up the ante, for each of these ten he uses a different creative crew. So you would expect some of these ten to be more adventurous and successful than others.

This is the case. This is the least successful of them so far.

The value, at least to me, in these is how much Kieslowski there is compared to Piesiewicz. The more of Kieslowski's visual improvisation, the better. This has very little. Blunt viewers will still enjoy the story, which is interesting as such things go. But there's little of the master here. Must have been a time of rest.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Gorgeous Use of Metaphors

[Hitchcoc · 10/10 · 24 June 2021]

A young Jewish woman, who felt she was wronged as a child, seeks out the elderly woman whom she felt betrayed her. This woman has lived with her decisions most of her life, knowing that what she did was necessary but seemingly cruel. This film is a masterpiece of subtlety and real human feeling. At no time is there rage or overt anger, only an effort to get questions answered. The thing that stands out is the theme that we can't change the past; that time mutes everything. The crooked painting and the contortionist are striking symbols of changes and corrections being hard, if not impossible. I really liked this one.

Dekalog 8

[chaos-rampant · 12 March 2016]

This is not a particularly remarkable Dekalog. But it's simple and lays out as clearly as any of them the blueprint that Kieslowski worked towards, both in these 10 Dekalogs, the longer short films, and it remains to be seen I guess if he perfects and evolves this for the color trilogy.

The twofold blueprint is that we have a world and a story that takes place. The world across the 10 Dekalogs is the same few months in the life of an apartment block, ostensibly the same few months the show aired. Here for example we have the story of Dekalog 2 with the dying husband laid through as something that happened in the same neighborhood.

Anyway this world is open-ended and ebbs forward and back with what the protagonists have set in motion around them. The most interesting thing about Dekalog is Kieslowski's ability, snippets of it in TV form, to render that visually as movements in emotional air.

The story each time focuses on a moral issue, here it's guilt, tied to the Polish experience of WWII and how it reverberates still. But time and again the story is reduced to two characters forlornly baring themselves to each other in a room, explaining or avoiding to. Bergman.

Here we have it clearly: the notion (during a class on ethics) of stories where readers (viewers) have to surmise the motivation of characters.

One of these viewers inside the class begins narrating her own story that begs for ethical interpretation: a Jewish girl in need of shelter from Nazi horror who was turned away from a Catholic Polish home.

Kieslowski attempts to visually inhabit a corner of this story (no more is allowed by the TV format): the old woman returns to the same WWII home where the story took place, the girl is lost and she looks for her distraught. She was the protagonist in that story, now inhabiting the memory of it.

Then we are back in a room where we have a deeper story that explains the former, giving us a plausible ethics that explain what seemed like wrongdoing at the time. This is the same Dekalog effort of setting up a story that they try to deepen later on with more complicated morals.

The idea is that we leave these Dekalogs with some insight into the destructiveness of what it means to inhabit a story (the Jewish girl carried that story of wrongdoing with her for 40 years) as well as some measure of realization about the complexity of inter-dependence forces at work behind the stories.

But this is too clear, a template on how to write rather than a poem.

Truly false witness

[duslrich · 23 September 2009]

"Simuland" him/herself bears false witness by spreading ignorance!: "What Polish underground? That must have been a really exclusive minority. There was no organized effort by any Polish underground to save Jews; whatever Jews happened to be rescued were done so by individuals acting on their own. To claim otherwise, as K. does, is to lie." FACT: Poland had the largest--and longest lived--underground in Europe during WWII! It gave France & Britain a copy of the Germans' enigma coding machine, & helped to crack the code. FACT: Future Georgetown University Jan Karski escaped to England to inform a doubting West of the Holocaust(including meetings with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and President Franklin D. Roosevelt). FACT: Zegota (the Council to Aid Jews)was a branch of the Polish underground established to rescue Jews from the Nazis.Its express purpose was to aid the country's Jews and find places of safety for them in occupied Poland. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe with such a dedicated secret organization.

Simuland then continues to spew his bigotry: "Widespread deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism both predated and survived the Nazi invasion; Poles killed Jews even after the Nazi's retreated. To this day they make life insufferable for the scarce Jews who remain in their country. (I have this directly from a Jewish colleague who grew up in and fled modern Communist Poland.)" There was strong animosity on both sides toward each other. This came from centuries of antagonistic living in close quarters (predicated by Poland's unprecedented religious tolerance--which is why 90% of European Jews lived autonomously in pre-partitioned Poland). While some Poles did kill Jews, it is likewise true that some Jews killed Poles. To blame the entire populations for the actions of the few, would be like blaming all Americans for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Many Jews were communists (the 1st. head of the party in post-war Poland, for example), and helped the Soviets to select & deport 2 million Poles to Siberia after Stalin invaded & divided the country with his ally, Hitler, in 1939 (within a year, 1 million of these Poles were dead). The "pogrom" he alludes was political. In the Cold War, Moscow backed the Arabs against the U.S. backed Israel. It directed the Polish Communist Party to rid itself of its Jewish faction. The non-Jewish & Jewish factions of the party were bitter rivals.

Maria Koscialkowska

[Kirpianuscus · 17 November 2018]

Like "Dekalog, jedem", it is one of the most powerful episode of the serie for me. The admirable performance of Maria Koscialkowska, the beautiful work of Teresa Marczewska as Elzbieta , reminding the performance of Krystyna Janda in "Dekalog ,dwa" are the lead virtues. The reference to the dilemma of Dorota Geller is, for same reason, a significant clue. In same measure, it is an episode about Shoah and its shadows, about fear and about resurrection of past price. About a decision and its profound, hidden roots. About the expected word. A special film. For the exploration of the memories of the viewer.

Movie Itself Bears False Witness

[simuland · 29 December 2000]

American Jewish Holocaust survivor returns to Poland to confront the woman who refused to save her from the Nazi's by refusing to falsify her Baptism papers when she was 6 (same age as the little girl of VII). This issue of the long-buried, unresolved/unresolvable hatred of the victim and guilt of the tormentor was much more effectively dramatized by the movie Death and the Maiden. As in VII, so much of the conflict takes place in the past, that the film ends up overly talky, too chatty. As usual, color coding intrudes.

Two major problems make the movie specious, morally duplicitous. One, the survivor's physical features, her thick lips, big nose, dark eyes, and coarse black hair, conform exactly to the derisive stereotype of the Jew used in myriad anti-Semitic cartoons dating from the 19th century through the 3rd Reich. It's like casting an African-American who looks just like a cartoon Sambo. Her homeliness stands in marked contrast to the attractiveness of each and every other female in the series. One can only wonder to what degree this was unintentional, unconscious, reflecting an accepted assumed bigotry.

Second, just like the contortionist in the park (was he meant to mock the film?), K. bends over backward to exonerate the Pole from guilt. The plot twist of her having received word in advance that the SS was sending out children in need of Baptism papers as decoys is just too convenient (again, that problem of credibility). Her belonging to the Polish underground is even harder to swallow, even more unlikely. What Polish underground? That must have been a really exclusive minority. There was no organized effort by any Polish underground to save Jews; whatever Jews happened to be rescued were done so by individuals acting on their own. To claim otherwise, as K. does, is to lie. Widespread deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism both predated and survived the Nazi invasion; Poles killed Jews even after the Nazi's retreated. To this day they make life insufferable for the scarce Jews who remain in their country. (I have this directly from a Jewish colleague who grew up in and fled modern Communist Poland.)

The bonding between victim and tormenter seems a hollow contrivance to evade responsibility. This is the only episode with a pat ending. In fact, it casts all those that preceded in a dubious light. It itself bears false witness.