Many films in film history focus on religious themes, and religious films (especially Christian films) have become a major genre of film. In religious films, some directly show religious stories, such as "The Gospel of Matthew", "The Last Temptation of Christianity", "The Passion of the Christ", etc., while others show their attitude towards religion and the metaphysics of the ultimate question of religion in relative secular themes Thinking, such as Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia" and "Sacrifice", Lars von Trier's "Anti-Christian" and so on. Polish film master Kieslowski's series "The Ten Commandments" belongs to the latter. The Ten Commandments, adapted from the Bible • The Ten Commandments of Moses, is a one-hour-per-episode series filmed by Kieslowski for Polish TV from 1988 to 1989. The fifth and sixth episodes were made into independent feature films, namely the famous "Murder Short Film" and "Love Short Film". The original Ten Commandments of Moses are: Do not worship other gods, do not make and worship idols, do not take the name of the Lord in vain, keep the Sabbath day holy, be filial to your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, Do not bear false witness, do not covet other people's property. In order to cater to the religious theme, Kieslowski will deliberately create a religious environment in which the story takes place. For example, the story of the third episode takes place on Christmas, and the fourth episode takes place on Easter. However, not every episode in Kieslowski's films corresponds to every commandment, and we seem to see different interpretations of the commandments in each episode. Clearly, Kieslowski did not want to be bound by rigid formal dogmas. "The director tells the stories with sympathy and sympathy of the characters who wish to live happier but often don't. They are connected by the mobile apartment buildings in Warsaw, leading to scenes of moral decision-making. Drama." In short, the film thinker focuses his lens on ordinary people, and ponders what religion means to ordinary people today. Through the film series The Ten Commandments, we see the power of religion in everyday life.
The image of death
A fundamental problem that cannot be solved in everyday life is death. The beginning of religion is always associated with death. "Religion is the most primitive and the most refined of all human transcendental forms of death. Religion, which originated from reflection on death, was once the spiritual pillar of human life. It remains so today. Before—both in physical and spiritual immortality, religion will always be with us.” If there were no death problems, there might be no more faith and spiritual fanaticism beyond the flesh, but as Borges As depicted in Immortality, the world of immortality seems to be a more terrifying picture than a world in which death exists, because it would be a wasteland of meaning.
Death is never lacking in Kieslowski's Ten Commandments. In the first scene of the second episode, the concierge found a dead rabbit falling from a certain window; in the third episode, the pills found in the heroine's clothes and the rusty blade in the home suggest suicide; the fifth episode opens with a greenish Dead water, dead mice, and the hanged cat (the protagonist Jacek was hanged in the end) created a strong sense of death. Apart from these obvious images, it can be said that many of the episodes of the Ten Commandments are directly related to death. The film begins with the accidental drowning of a young life, which undoubtedly sets a serious and heavy tone for the entire series; the husband's life is dying in the second episode, and Ava, the lover of the hero Janush, in the third episode. Made a bet herself that if Janush didn't stay with her until morning, she would kill herself; Episode 5 tells a straight story of a murder and ruthlessly portrays two murders (Jacek kills a taxi) The driver and his execution); episode 6 Tomek attempted suicide for love; episode 9 Roman decided to commit suicide because he mistakenly thought he had lost his wife's love, and his wife Ola eventually died of heart surgery (there is an astonishing Coincidence: Kieslowski himself died of heart surgery), a funeral shortly after the tenth episode...
Why is Kieslowski so obsessed with death, and why is it always about death in his films? (This can't help but remind us of the famous death chapters in Kieslowski's films, such as "Song of Opportunity" where the final shot is frozen at the moment when the plane explodes, and Veronica in "Veronica's Double Life". The sudden death of being stuck on the stage, the opening chapter of "Blue" is a car accident that destroys a family...) Here, on the one hand, we can say that Kieslowski, the thinker who speaks in movies, is thinking about life and death, On the other hand, can we also think that it is through the question of life and death that Kieslowski is exploring what religion really means in people's daily life? Just think, when we don't face the problem of life and death, how can we most desire to obtain God's will? Therefore, although death is the last step in life, it is the first step for ordinary people today to truly feel the power of religion. Through the fear, contemplation and reverence of death, religion has entered our daily life and plays the role of savior; it is precisely because of the confusion about death that people begin to leave a place for God in their hearts.
2. The Awakening
of God Nietzsche, who shouted "God is dead", would never have thought that with the development of technology, God would naturally awaken in people's daily life. Religious questions, while unverifiable, like many metaphysical questions, cannot be falsified; they are an elusive gray area. Thus, the question of whether God exists is "suspended" by cunning humans today, like many metaphysical ontological questions. Kieslowski did not explicitly tell the audience whether God exists or not, but he arranged many "God-like" images in "The Ten Commandments", we can call them "angels", and this image role is in He is a regular in his films of different periods. Here, Kieslowski does not seem to deny the existence of God completely, if we cannot say that he is fully resurrected after "God is dead", then, in the Ten Commandments, at least he is Started to wake up.
It doesn't matter whether these "angels" are related to God, because it is this ambiguity that best answers the question of whether God exists. Except in the seventh episode of this series where we couldn't find the existence of the angel (because of the damage of the relevant shooting material at that time), we can basically find its incarnation in every episode. In the first episode, Professor Krzysztof, a scientist who does not believe in religion, calculated that the thickness of the ice on the lake has reached the level of ice skating, but his son never returned and was buried at the bottom of the lake. This episode of Angel is a young man in a furry coat, sitting next to a bonfire on the ice, staring coldly at the camera, as if telling those who don't believe in God should keep in mind the main commandment of this episode: Except for me You must have no other gods besides them. And this "angel" also seems to play a narrative role in the play: Was the bonfire he lit on the lake the reason why the ice began to melt? In the fifth episode of "Murder Short Film", the bloodthirsty image of "Angel" took a sharp turn and became benevolent. The male protagonist Jacek in this episode is a typical existential character. He does not seem to need a reason to kill, because existence is absurd. "Angel" appeared before the murder, and he seemed to shake his head, as if to warn Jacek not to kill, but it obviously didn't work. And in the ninth episode, "Angel" finally completed "self-salvation", he appeared at the moment when the hero tried to commit suicide twice, and this miraculous "last minute rescue" also made the hero lucky to live down. If experiencing life and death is only one function of the "angel", its more common function is "pure staring." Taking the sixth episode of "Love Short Film" as an example, "Angel" appeared in two different situations of the hero Tomek, one happy and one sad. For the first time, because the object of her crush, Magda, agreed to go on a date with her, the elated Tome pulled her milk cart around in circles. At this time, the angel passed by as a passerby and smiled. The second time, Tomek was driven away by Magda, and "Angel" passed by again as a passerby. Although angels always appear at critical moments in people's lives, they have no effect on the male protagonist's life. Even though he can have his own emotions (smile), he is just a bystander here.
As a bystander, neither "angels" nor gods can give real guidance to people in reality, and the original clear commandments seem to have lost their effect at this time. However, the sanctuary reserved by reason for religion has always been there, and perhaps it is precisely because of the possibility space left for the unknown that we will be religiously concerned about many things that we cannot understand. Because our rigid rationality appears so insignificant in the face of the fluid unknown, there is a tendency to mystify the whole of life.
3. The Mystification of Everyday Life
Although Wittgenstein tells us to keep silent about the unknown, he obviously ignores the Dionysian madness of art's fascination with the mystical. Here art is allied with religion, making up for the innate inadequacy of reason in understanding the world. In The Ten Commandments, which represents the daily life of contemporary people, the element of mystification is present in each episode, especially in Kieslowski's predilection for the use of various mystical imagery.
The computer screens in the first episode have a certain prophetic flavor. Shortly after the film starts, Professor Krzysztov's computer will start up by itself, and his computer will automatically turn on when his son dies; when Krzysztov frantically asks the computer for the answer to the cause of his son's death, the computer follows his The input shows a few words that are full of religious sense: lamp, fire, light, symbol, church, cross. When he entered "meaning" and "hope," the computer displayed "unknown term." This is undoubtedly a painful blow to the image of the father's positivist, and it is in line with the commandment of "you shall have no other gods but me". It seems that there is no need to leave hope for those who do not believe in God. In the sixth episode, Magda's fingers helplessly move in the spilled milk while crying alone, and Tomek also pokes his fingers with scissors and sucks his own blood. At this time, both of them seem to be symbolized by The fluids of lust are mysteriously connected. In addition, there is a circular mirror in front of Magda's window, peeping from Tomek's perspective, the mirror is like a kaleidoscope, constantly changing the picture of Magda's world. This reflective object is Kieslowski's favorite tool for creating a sense of mystery, and he seems to want to show a world that is the opposite of the simple world we perceive on a daily basis, full of incomprehensible elements. , just like the colorful crystal ball in Veronica's Double Life.
It can be said that Kieslowski uses these mysterious images to restore a more primitive world, in which artificial division is replaced by natural unity, empirical science gives way to art, rational cognition into an irrational experience, "irrationality is the essential feature of all mysticism". Kieslowski uses the light and shadow of the lens and the ingenious construction of montage to let these mysterious images grow naturally in the minds of the audience, and uses the lens of art to reflect the potential unknown of daily life itself. Generally speaking, when there are many unexplained mysterious connections in life, people may start to question the authenticity of the world they see with their own eyes, causing chaos in daily life; paradoxically, when people become more and more in the face of the unknown Feeling helpless, the more he longs for a kind of controllable stability as the other pole of balancing the unknown, making daily life appear more orderly. The latter is the powerful moral force of religion in this world.
4. Everyday Moralization of
Religion "No aspect of religion, nor any creed, can be without its ethical counterpart." "Religion not only directly expounds ethical norms in doctrine, but also indirectly formulates on the basis of doctrine. All kinds of ethical norms. The influence of religion in the real society mainly lies in its moral norms, in addition, getting norms is also a solid foundation of religion." Kieslowski's "Ten Commandments" are often referred to by people as Calling it Ten Moral Stories, it presents audiences with the moral dilemmas of ordinary people, which always have a similar characteristic—difficulty resolving in everyday norms. And the focus on moral choice is also the consistent style of the film master.
For example, in the second episode, Dorota's husband is critically ill, and she finds out that she is pregnant with someone else's child, so she asks the doctor if her husband can survive, and if so, she will abort the child; otherwise, she will keep the child. What we see here is the conflict and contradiction between the daily code of ethics and the Ten Commandments of Moses "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and life itself. In the fourth episode, the father and daughter Michal and Anka lived in peace. When the daughter Anka told her father that he was not her biological father, Michal's long-suppressed incestuous feelings took the opportunity to release, so the two Man is in the midst of an extremely dangerous incestuous ambiguity. Couldn't they really have developed a romantic relationship without a natural biological connection? At this time, the conflict between "do not commit adultery" and "respect your parents" is particularly dazzling. In the seventh episode, Meika "kidnapped" her "sister" Ania, when they were actually mother and daughter. In order to protect Meika, who was not yet an adult, her mother said that Ania was her child. Now Meika can't bear the lie. She wants to get her daughter back, but her mother doesn't agree. The moral prohibition corresponding to this episode is "Do not steal". The mother's behavior did cause harm to Meika, but was her behavior really considered stealing? Conversely, is it not stealing to "kidnap" one's own daughter in the mother's shelter? In the eighth episode, a six-year-old girl is brought to a couple's apartment in Warsaw during World War II. It was hoped that they would let her hide there, but Sophia, now a professor of philosophy, refused the request at the time. Because her religion prohibits them from perjury, that is, lying to the authorities. At this point, the audience can't help but ask, which is more important between the belief of "no false witness" and the protection of a child in reality?
In this way, Kieslowski uses the film to present intractable moral dilemmas arising from religion, and behind their correspondence and superficial conflicts with the Ten Commandments of Moses, are the questions that are more important outside of everyday life. Deep thinking, which brings people back to religion. What we see here is an interactive relationship between religion and daily morality, which seems to show us that the ultimate interpretation of human morality is ultimately in heaven. The fundamental perplexity of daily morality cannot be fully answered only by means of knowledge and precepts in life, because there are more profound metaphysical reasons behind it. Those who believe that morality can exist independently of religion deserves reflection here. Cai Yuanpei, who proposed "replacing religion with aesthetic education", believes that compared with religion, aesthetic sense has transcendence and universality like religion, and it does not have the drawback of excessive religious sentiment. Similarly, Feng Youlan also proposed "replacing religion with philosophy". He argues that the Chinese "do not care much about religion because they care so much about philosophy. They are not religious because they are all philosophical. They also express and appreciate super-moral values in philosophy, and living according to philosophy also I have experienced these transcendent moral values.” Whether it is aesthetic education or philosophy, excluding religious connotations, they now refer more to the present world planned and expected by reason, and their transcendence and universality are more aimed at the present world. of. They may be able to give death an explanation, but they cannot fill people's hearts with huge doubts about the unknown, and they cannot give people perfect commandments when faced with moral choices. Therefore, the important position of religion cannot be replaced so far.
But Kieslowski's film shows us that even if religion cannot be abolished, it can no longer be what it used to be in the lives of ordinary people. He used the Ten Commandments to show a daily life with no obvious trace of God, no priest's rigid preaching, but there is room for faith everywhere. Perhaps this is the picture of the everyday meaning of religion, the power of religion in the moral realm today. Swiss theologian Hans Kueng believes that religion is not only a belief in God or God, but also an effort for self-transcendence and a sense of reverence for nature. Perhaps, for us, the film series "Ten Commandments" by the film master Kieslowski is to enlighten us: even if there is no faith, we should retain a deep reverence for the unknown.
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