Monday, May 24, 2010

More

Saturday I began watching the first couple short films from Kieslowski's Decalogue series. These are short films he made for Polish T.V. based loosely on the ten commandments. There is not a one to one correlation between them and the commandments. Instead, these are stories of people involved in particular scenarios that bring up various moral dilemmas. The first of the films involved a father and his son. Both were scientifically minded, the son being a genius of about 7 or less. The father gave absolute authority, apparently, to his computer, which sat glowing like an idol in his apartment. Because of his trust in the computer and in numbers, his son died.
The second film, which I will need to watch again, is about a woman who is pregnant fairly late in life. Her husband is dying; he is not the father of the child. In fact, he is sterile, so the wife presses the man's doctor to tell her whether the man will in fact recover. If so, she will have an abortion. If not, she will keep the child and go off with the father of the child to make a life. What happens is unexpected and complex--so much so, that I must watch it again. There is another film on the disc, but I haven't watched it yet.
I couldn't get the disc to work on my DVD because the machine I have is primitive and doesn't have a button that would allow me to designate which of the several things on the disk I want to watch. We have no remote for the player because it is attached to the cable on the tv. So I had to watch it on the computer.

2 comments:

Lou said...

Honestly, those stories would give ME nightmares!

Robbi N. said...

Perhaps so, but I really like Kieslowski. He is such a wonderful film-maker.