Decalogue

On February 24th, we watched to different films from Decalogue 1 and 5. The first film dealt with the first commandment, "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange Gods before me".  In the first episode, the theme becomes very prevalent as to how Kieslowski tied this film to the first commandment. To start the episode, the camera is focused on a man alone by a frozen lake, and as the camera pans around to his face, you can see his eyes adjust to look directly into the camera; symbolizing a being that is always watching. Throughout the film, this character is seen as watching many other characters as they carry along on the frozen ice. In this film, the main characters are seen as a father, who is a university professor in computer science,  and his young son. They bond over technology, as they both enjoy the various functions computers can carry out after they have programmed them. A key point in the film is when the father trusts his computer program to declare that the frozen lake was thick and cold enough to withstand his young son skating on it. Later in the film, tragedy strikes as his son was skating and fell through the ice. Even though his father was a brilliant computer programmer who fully trusted and believed in technology, the very thing he worshiped led to his son's death. This ties back to the first commandment. The film revealed that the father was not a very religious man, but instead invested his life to technology and trusted in his computer programing as a being of worship, which directly disobeys the first commandment.

The second film had to deal with fifth commandment, "Thou shall not kill". Throughout the film, the characters that are focused upon act in deviant ways and appear to come off as morally bad individuals. The film follows a young man, who has walked around town acting poorly to people, trying to find a taxi to leave town. While he is walking around, the film also follows a middle aged taxi driver who is treating people equally as poor. Eventually, these two men meet, and the taxi driver takes the young man outside of town to a secluded area, where the young man has plotted to strangle and beat the taxi driver to death. Eventually the young man was caught, and sentenced to execution. The execution depicted a scene as premeditated and as brutal as the actual murder. This scene calls capitol punishment into question, by creating a scenario where the old lesson of "two wrongs don't make a right" becomes relevant. It also makes the viewer question whether or not a execution sentence goes against the fifth amendment.