Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing: An Untold Plot.
The paths of three men: A cabbie, a lawyer, and a killer cross on a somber March day in this psychological study of murder, a detailed documentation of death that launched Kieslowski’s international career. This film was instrumental in the abolition of the death penalty in Poland.
Photo 1. — Jacek Łazar (Miroslaw Baka) (Source: https://devduttblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/short-notes-on-a-short-film-about-killing/)
“I think the film isn’t about capital punishment but about killing in general. It says that all killing is bad, and it doesn’t matter why one kills, or who one kills or who is doing the killing. It is despicable, abominable, and beyond approval. At least from an ethical standpoint.”
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988) follows three men in Warsaw — a young man named Jacek, a taxi driver, and a newly minted public defender — as their lives converge after Jacek brutally murders the taxi driver and the lawyer is appointed to defend him as he faces his own death.
Kieślowski asks a central question: is the rational state-sponsored killing of a juvenile delinquent more violent than the irrational murder committed by the delinquent? (Short notes) The film is part of a cycle of films he made called the Decalogue which is based on the ten commandments. “[A] commentary on Freudian and Gnostic themes of Selfhood that produce a pathological forwarding of time. It is to be noted that in Kieslowski everything is represented in the frame and there is as such no out-of-field. (Short notes) He uses film as a mechanism for the population to confront and make a lasting introspective statement about the narrative’s subject matter. (Haughbolle) Cinematographer Sławomir Idziak’s inspired use of bilious colored filters turns 1980s Warsaw into a living hell.
It’s not even 5 minutes into the film and we are introduced to the three characters whose lives are just about to entwine. The opening sequence sets the tone for the entire narrative to come. It starts with a dead rat, a cat hanging by a noose, a shrunken head in a rearview mirror in a world of dark clouds and mud. A bad omen.
Jacek, the drifter, a Kafkaesque character of sorts, meets a street artist: they talk about talent. Of which Jacek has none. If you have a talent then you are not lost. Montage serves as the perfect connecting technique. The juxtaposition of shots/characters –so to speak, makes it clear that these three characters, who seem completely oblivious of each other’s existence, will cross paths, imminently. Each for his own reasons. Miroslaw Baka’s Jacek character is a ‘monster’ in the first half of the narrative. A small-time-gangster as such –with a not-so-defined code of manliness, that is ruthless and violent; who is openly rebellious against a social, patriarchal, and/or domesticated father-model in a dark, dystopian setting. You can feel he is ostracized as a villain long before the narrative even begins.
Kieślowski makes extensive use of green and yellow filters precisely to emphasize the abnormal psychology of Jacek Lazar. (Short notes) He chases pigeons, throws rocks at traffic below from an overpass, and barks like a rabid dog at foreigners on a random street. Later on, we realize his masculinity is threatened or at least fractured. He is a drifter, most probably unemployed and lost in a senseless vicious cycle of non-ending mental disruptiveness. He suffers from a severe depression, perhaps. To tell you the truth, he looks like a character from a Kafka story [who] suffers a series of random shocks, dangers, and rejections. [ ] way before the narrative even starts. Punishment is the very stuff of the narrative (Stern, World of Kafka) The entire visual mood appears Kafkaesque and distorted to the point of madness, for effect. [The city] has become “remote, inaccessible, [and] mysterious.” (Anders, Kafka)
Just like in a Kafka story, Jacek ventures into a non-ending struggle to determine a non-existent centre, or destination. [He] “attempts to grow into it is doomed to failure. The [hero] cannot penetrate to its centre, for he does not belong there. [The hero] may be spiritually non-existent, always arriving but never reaching his destination, [ ] who inevitably arrives too late. Life becomes a perpetual scramble from place to place. As soon as he arrives, he is no longer wanted.” (Anders, Kafka) Curiously enough, in his writing “images of torture appear over and over again -whips, knives, screws, spurs, gags [ ] With few exceptions, all this ferocity is of course directed to one person: Himself.” (Stern, World of Kafka) Jacek is a nihilistic man. He is a total failure, in total despair, torn between body and soul. This is juxtaposed with Krzysztof Globisz’s Piotr character being interviewed talking about why he has decided to become a public defender. Action is character.
Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesewicz developed the script. [ ] They did not leave room for the characters to slather platitudes about life and justice all over the diegesis; there are no patronizing voiceovers and no lengthy, lofty monologues. The film identifies the fundamental ethical questions surrounding murder and punishment using incisive dialogue during the murder, after the trial, and during the execution. Kieślowski and Piesewicz use their script to examine the ethical and political questions surrounding capital punishment, but there is ample room provided for the viewers’ necessarily divergent interpretations.” (Sobolik) As established, the film isn’t about killing.
Over the lapse of its severe narrative (aprox. 86 min) shot through a hazy green/yellowish filter with heavy shadows, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing becomes a macabre act of butchery in two parts. In the first, a lumpen young man kills a taxi driver for no reason apparently. In the second: he is caught, brought to trial, condemned to death and executed. Both deaths are dreadful. Socially repugnant. And yet it takes a highly visual filmic tactic to do something about it. “We all know the reasons why society kills the boy but we don’t know his own real human reasons and we never will.” All conceived in an apathetic atmosphere of decadent nation and manifesting blatantly the relationship of man and collective. The truth be told, the film is not easy to watch. But, as audience, we leave the projection overtly satisfied and greatly rewarded. A true cinematic experience. One particularly brilliant aspect of A Short Film About Killing is Kieślowski’s entirely “unsentimental portrayal of both victim and perpetrator.” (Henderson)
The film is set in Warsaw. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s argues that “The city and the surrounding world is filmed in a very deliberate way. [Slavomir Idziak] used colored filters which he made specially for the film. The filters were green. So the color of the film is deliberately greenish. Green is normally the color of spring, the color of hope. But if you put a green filter on the camera, the world you see is much crueler, more desolate and empty, than if the filter wasn’t there! So the style the cameraman used in the film is closely tied to its subject. The city is empty, the city is dirty, the city is sad and the people are the same.” (Kieślowski) A visual methodology that changes radically standard cinema dynamics.
This film was instrumental in the abolition of the death penalty in Poland, due in part to the mobilization potential of cinema. Moving images are the best way to reach the most illiterate of the population, for instance. (Stojanova) But why? One reason is its scopic regime or put differently, its empowering visuality that helped not only activate a somnambulant audience but re-envisioned ways of seeing the reality in the country long after the war was over. These images [shots and sequence of the film] had the power to change attitudes because for some reason seeing comes before words (Berger in Rose 6) Cinematographer Idziak films [it] in “grimy sepia-drenched tones and obscures the edges of his camera frame with dark, brownish filters that accentuate their otherwise unexplained sense of encroaching doom [ ] Though the three occasionally cross paths momentarily, their fated cosmic connection doesn’t manifest itself until the film’s first harrowing murder scene.”(Henderson) As if to say, it is fatality that weaves their ever-looming calamity.
During the mid-1970s economic prosperity peaked in Poland, Kieślowski reconsidered why there was so much stupidity and evil in everyday reality. [ ] “He realized that although ideology influenced human behavior in the highest degree, there were also other circumstances — sometimes man-made and sometimes completely coincidental — shaping his nature. In his press interviews the director often spoke about moral dilemmas which accompany film making and about the necessity of recording the reality from a detached point of view.” (Miczka)
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing is a truly photographic experience. A masterpiece for the senses. Working in collaboration with the musical scoring of Zbigniew Preisner -whose jagged, sensualist orchestral rumblings underscore the film’s sense of moral desperation, Kieślowski takes what, “on the surface, could be easily read as a straightforward rumination on one of God’s more blunt commandments [Thou shalt not kill] and delivers an anguished, two-act take on the inseparable and diseased connection between isolated violent acts and those sanctioned by governing systems, between the murderers that hide behind institutional anonymity and those who cannot hide their face from the police.” (Henderson) A brilliant conflation.
Krzysztof Kieślowski wanted to make the film because he felt all of this was being done in his name. And he simply voiced his discontent. “So if someone puts a noose around somebody else’s neck and kicks a stool from under his feet, then does it in my name. And I don’t like it. I don’t want this to be done.”(Kieślowski) A direct statement.
Kieślowski argues that film “doesn’t exist without a viewer. And the viewer is most important. The art for art’s sake, form for form’s sake, falling down under the weight of self-talent or sagacity — these aren’t things for me. I want to tell a story which touches people, for touching is close to me.” ( Miczka)
In Kieślowski’s opinion there is neither liberty nor equality in the world. [ ] “Mankind should try to make those ideas unforgettable and he should even try to find a way towards them. That is why the films, inspired by the European thought that had risen from the Great French Revolution, reflected the reality full of axiological confusion, where new values can be created only by means of individual attitudes:” ( Miczka)
“ […] I started making feature films — I thought it was much easier as far as responsibility was concerned. What do I actually do? I hire actors, people for a certain job. And I have made those movies for many years, and suddenly I saw that I have left a normal life completely, in which something else is important, for the next day depends on it and the people’s attitude towards us depends on it, too. [ ] I left this all and actually chose a very comfortable place where everything is imagined and lots of money is spent on a fabulous life or a world that doesn’t exist. There are huge emotions in this world, but they are untrue. And I realized I went to a completely ridiculous place, I started living in a life that’s untrue. […] that I have no normal life at all… […] There is no life. There’s only fiction instead. […]” ( Miczka)
The taxi driver is battered with a stone and dies slowly, while the long-winded bureaucratic precision of the hanging was apparently so horrendous to film that Kieślowski’s team had to break off in the middle. “ I could never come to terms with the idea of the death penalty, but I also can’t accept something like killing. I think the film isn’t about capital punishment but about killing in general. It says that all killing is bad, and it doesn’t matter why one kills, or who one kills or who is doing the killing! [ ] It is despicable, abominable, and beyond approval. At least from an ethical standpoint.” (Kieślowski)
The two most violent scenes are there to shock us, but for a good reason. “What makes them powerful is the rest of the film. It is shot by Slavomir Idziak with the aid of lowering, ochre-colored filters that render the young man’s world like a purgatorial nightmare. Never has Warsaw and its environs looked so depressing. And it does work. You can sense the character is doomed to face the untraceable: To kill and to be killed in a fugal way.” (Derek)
The film opens with a dead rat and a cat that has been strung up by its neck by a pack of sniggering children. A premonition to the consequent ruthless murders that will ensue. Kieślowski follows “three seemingly unconnected people around Warsaw, and though Piotr (Krzysztof Globisz) is celebrating his successful Bar Exam performance, a taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) and a sullen young drifter, Jacek (Miroslaw Baka), are discernibly wrestling with depression/aggression.” (Henderson)
Waldemar Rekowski (Jan Tesarz) is a middle-aged cab driver in Warsaw who enjoys his profession and the freedom it affords. His concern for turning a profit leads him to ignore some potential fares in favor of others. An overweight and crude man, Waldemar also enjoys staring at young women. His initial statement foreshadows his appalling encounter with Jacek “I dislike cats, as treacherous as people.”
Jacek Łazar (Miroslaw Baka) in turn is a 21-year-old drifter who recently arrived in Warsaw from the countryside and is now aimlessly wandering the streets of the city. He seems to take pleasure in causing other people’s misfortunes: He throws a stranger into the urinals of a public toilet after being approached sexually. He drops a large stone from a bridge onto a passing vehicle causing an accident. And he scares away pigeons to spite an old lady who was feeding them. He performs these acts violently and viciously.
The taxi driver demonstrates a knack for picking out the most desperate prospective fares and then coldly leaving them behind on the curb. And the drifter’s contempt for others is best represented in the café, where he takes swigs off of other people’s leftover bottles and then methodically spits in his own cup of coffee, lest someone else tries to finish his. It would be all too easy to read this stylistic choice — treating both hunter and hunted with seemingly unabashed nihilism — as a means of setting up a blanket condemnation of capital punishment in totally black-and-white terms. (Henderson) Jacek exhibits some excessive masculine distinctiveness that sets them apart from the other two characters. This highly-visible masculinity seems to be the driver of the violence. He is hard. Or at least tries to be. He appears to be a ‘gangster’ of sorts, determined to deploy his rage and fury at any cost. He comes from a bad home and his lack of education is tangible. He is a pathetic figure who would seem set for a life of tragedy. It is evident that something sinister is about to happen. Later on, we are confronted with two shocking acts. In both instances, he is seeking redemption through extermination perhaps.
Traditional models of masculinity [ are ] “based on obligations to the family and the state through fatherhood and professional work, the gangster’s authority came from his self-reliance. The gangster performed his masculinity through crime and violence, and from this he derived his own sense of authority separate from the traditional family and work spheres.” (Sitter) Add to this his lack of talent. He is completely lost to the extent he needs to commit violence to make sense of his own existence. His identity/gendered-violence provides the tool for it within a dark past-triggered context that keeps spiraling in his head.
A man is expected to take revenge for his past ordeal. Jacek must have experienced multiple incidents of trauma causing feelings of helplessness and hopelessness leading to suicidal thought. If he is too afraid to kill himself, then why not shift the anger at a random target: The cab driver seems the perfect one. What is so striking is that Jacek attempts to contextualize his anger and feelings of anguish, as a character in a narrative that provides little clues.
Feminist theorist and philosopher Kimberly Hutchings argues that war anchors masculinity because masculinity reflects traits necessary for war and provides “a framework through which war can be rendered both intelligible and acceptable as a social practice and institution”. (Sitter) Jacek operates within this framework in a state of inner war. He is at war with himself.
Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz) is a young and idealistic soon-to-be lawyer who has just passed the bar exam. He takes his wife to a café where they discuss their future. At the same café, Jacek is sitting at a table handling a length of rope and a stick which he keeps in his bag. The rope and stick appear to be a weapon. He puts away the rope and stick when he spots two girls playing at the other side of the window and he engages in a game with them.
One of the most critical moments that relates to the encounter with the young girls is Jacek’s sister’s death. He goes to a photographer to have her first communion picture blown up despite its wear and tear damage. This is the focal point of Jacek’s trauma, which is brought up during his conversation with the young lawyer. It may also be construed as a redeeming value to his character/persona, as he seems to be deeply affected by his little sister’s death, as well as his mother’s suffering. “The photograph of the sister represents the aura of death which the state sponsored apparatus strips Jacek of. Kieslowski presents a retrograde gaze where the protagonist looks at the past whilst the world of chance, fortune tellers and palm readers focus on the future. In other words, a film plays either in the future or in the past; or in both, but never in the present.” (Short notes)
Jacek holds on to his sister’s memory and the love for his mother by asking Piotr to retrieve the blow-up of his sister’s picture from the photographer, as he gives Piotr the receipt, and give the picture to his mother, so she has something to hold on to after having two of her children killed. He seeks redemption of some sort. His execution, in spite of his despair and disarray as a social-humanoid is similar to that of a soldier executed for desertion. He cannot undo what has been perpetrated onto him or others.
Jacek is keenly disturbed by the killing of his sister at the hands of a tractor driver. His violence, stemming from this traumatic act is directed towards all drivers. This is represented in the shot where he throws a stone from a bridge that disturbs the equilibrium of a car off screen. In this way Krzysztof Kieślowski is allowing chance to enter the assemblage of the film. The assemblage for killing is represented through first the rope and then the State’s apparatus for capital punishment. Since the plot results in murder, the apparatus of capturing violence needs to be shown either as close-up or as a mechanism. (Short notes) Meanwhile, Waldemar has been driving his taxicab around the city looking for a fare. He stops near the café just as Jacek approaches and enters the cab. He asks to be driven to a remote part of the city near the countryside and insists the driver take a longer and more remote route.
At their destination, Jacek tries to kill Waldemar with the rope, but stops and hides when people approach.
Mulvey argues that the spectator identifies with the hero because he embodies the spectator/subject’s mirror stage self-image: [ ] A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are . . . those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator. (Mulvey, 1989: 20) Krzysztof Kieślowski attempts to confront an entire society with Jacek via identification: to say we are all the perpetrators here as well as deliberate victims. In the process of victimization no one is saved, at least from an ethical standpoint. And it works.
The driver is still breathing and tries unsuccessfully to remove the rope from his neck. Jacek then completes his gruesome task by repeatedly smashing the barely conscious taxicab driver over the head with a large rock. Jacek then takes the taxicab to the river and dumps the body. When a children’s song comes on the radio, he gets upset, rips out the radio, and discards it.
He drives the car to a grocery store where he talks to a girl who jumps into the car. She notices a clown’s head hanging from the mirror and asks Jacek where he got the car. He suggests that they could go away together, but she keeps asking where the car comes from as a taxi driver with the same car was trying to flirt with her earlier the same day. [ ] Kieslowski is documenting death and this is the equivalent of producing images that can never be represented: the shaking of the feet as life leaves the body. (pornographic images.)” (Short notes)
Sometime later, Jacek is caught and imprisoned. He is interviewed by his criminal defense lawyer, Piotr, for whom this is his first case after finishing his legal studies. Piotr has little chance of winning the case against Jacek because of the strong evidence against his client. In spite of Piotr’s efforts, Jacek is found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Piotr approaches a judge afterwards asking if he could’ve done more to save his client’s life. The judge assures him that Piotr gave the best argument against the death penalty he’s heard in years, but that the legal outcome is correct. “Speaking like Freud, Jacek has an incestuous love for his dead sister Marya (representing Mother Mary) which is projected onto Beatrice (meaning “Blessed One”) so that Jesus (represented by Jacek) can be resurrected from the dead like Lazarus (Jacek’s last name is Lazar) Kieslowski ornaments his expressionistic world with a sense of Gnosticism in which illumination and self-realization are more important than sin and repentance. In other words, sin is nothing other than ignorance of an ultimate reality.” (Short notes)
The level of violence on screen is unrestricted. And yet it does not reach the point of ‘inspiring’ others with a desire for imitation. The film’s second half sees the drifter awaiting his execution by the state. Kieślowski carefully elides the details of the trial, cutting directly from Jacek’s slip-up to the verdict of the trial and keeping his scenario tightly focused on the parallel build-ups.) Myriad details from the first section are echoed in the second half, such as when the executioner winds the noose’s slack in nearly the same manner that Jacek wrapped lengths of rope around his hand in the café. But, in stark contrast to the first murder’s wordless anticipation, Jacek has the knowledge of his impending death, and Kieślowski uses this crucial difference to staggering effect in the lengthy pre-execution scene when Jacek opens up to Piotr, who it turns out defended his indefensible case.” (Henderson)
On the appointed day, the executioner arrives at the jail and prepares for the hanging. Piotr is at the prison to attend the execution, and an official congratulates him on having just become a father. In the moments before his execution, Jacek reveals to Piotr that his younger sister was killed by a tractor driven by his drunken friend, and that he was drinking with him; he says he never fully recovered from the tragic episode. Jacek then requests that he be given the final space in his family’s grave which was reserved for his mother — that he be buried next to his sister and his father. The warden repeatedly asks if they are finished talking; Piotr defiantly says he will never be finished. Jacek makes some petty last requests to his lawyer. They conclude things would’ve turned out differently if the girl had not tragically died.
Photo 2. — Krzysztof Kieślowski on set (Source: https://kinoimages.wordpress.com/tag/a-short-film-about-killing/ )
At the Mythical level Mary, Jesus and Lazarus present us with the mythic forwarding of time. In other words, modern cinema functions at the level of the real, mythic and historical. (Short notes)
Jacek is then taken from his cell and marched to the execution chamber by several prison guards. The confirmation of his sentence is read to him as well as the decision to deny clemency. He is given last rites by a priest, and offered a final cigarette by the warden. When he requests to have one without filter instead, the executioner steps forward, lights one of his cigarettes and puts it into Jacek’s mouth. Jacek takes a few puffs before it is stubbed out. Just before he is hanged, he breaks free from his guards and begins to yell uncontrollably before his hands are shackled and he is quickly hanged with ruthless efficiency. Afterwards, Piotr drives to an empty field where he sobs. Jacek, Piotr and Waldemar all have parallel storylines which converge to re-emphasize perspective. Jacek is precisely Jesus in a pathological landscape and commits murder to force suicide which he is unable to commit. Suicide is a form of grace through which the profane becomes profound. Speaking like Deleuze, the film functions according to the Action-Situation-Action regime of the movement-image where the sensory and motor produce an event. However, time is not “out of joint” as we see the pathology of a “normal” state apparatus playing itself out. Kieslowski choreographs the scene with Waldemar’s murder so that first the horn and then the radio populate the information on the soundtrack i.e. the gesture is represented through sound. (Short notes)
According to Henderson, Kieślowski plays the devil’s advocate well, and he poses an interesting question to the Polish government represented in the film: What better can you expect of your populace when your systematic murders are more inhuman and far less accountable than even the most heinous of criminals’ actions? He drives this point home when he stages the state’s murder of Jacek in direct counterpoint with the film’s earlier murder. Whereas the cabbie’s death was characterized by randomness, hazy motivation and slow, slipshod execution, Jacek’s sentence is all jogging guards, barked by-the-book commands, a priest who can seal the condemned forehead with the sign of the cross but is unable or refuses to offer comfort when Piotr collapses in terror. (Henderson)
At the end of counts, we see two bodies –A significant concept in itself: One brutally and mortally beaten and dragged out of the car and left to rotten and a second fading out until ultimate annihilation in a cold, mesmerizing fashion. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze argues that, “a body must be understood not in terms of a form or functions, but with reference instead to its relations of speed and slowness (longitude) and to what it can do, by its capacity to affect and to be affected (latitude) [ ] A body is not a ‘thing,’ but a becoming, a series of processes (movements, intensities, and flows.) It is a mobile assemblage of connections which might be extended, but which might equally be severed. ” (Body Reader)
Kieślowski strides to humanize Jacek in the penultimate scene with Piotr, he ultimately takes a gamble of good faith on that portion of the audience that might bristle at the notion of actually contemplating the human worth of a seemingly unrepentant murder. Just as he tested audience sympathies earlier in the film with the café scene, he throws caution to the wind and has Jacek rationalize that if his sister hadn’t died as a child he might not have murdered the cabbie — there are undoubtedly those who watch the film who will find this explanation inexcusable. (Henderson)
In one scene, Piotr Balicki (Krystof Globisz) is asked to defend his thesis that punishing criminals to intimidate the rest of the population is flawed. He responds with a quotation from Karl Marx: “ [] since Cain the world has neither been intimidated nor ameliorated by punishment.” In addition to the direct commentary, this film is rife with one-liners that serve to accentuate the setting (Soviet-era Poland) and provide humanity to events and characters alike that are treated with sterility in court. Early in the film, Jacek (Mirosław Baka) goes to a movie ticket-booth and asks the cashier if the film this week is any good. The cashier replies, “It’s a love story but it’s boring” (perhaps a humorous reference to Kieślowski’s own A Short Film About Love, which is so not boring), while she fixes her hair with a little too much attention to individual strands. “What are you doing?” Jacek asks, to which she responds, “pulling out my grey hairs.” (Sobolik)
Faces often disappear into the haze. This is a striking effect, given that the majority of the screen-time otherwise is devoted to tight shots of the protagonists’ faces; entire bodies are rarely shown in a single frame. During Jacek’s execution, there is a brilliant cut in from a wide shot of everybody in the room listening to the warden repeat the sentence to Jacek’s view of his face. With the change in perspective come subtle changes that convey Jacek’s terror like magic, the whole thing so delicate and disconcerting. The warden’s voice booms directly out from the screen somehow, and his face sharpens and yellows with added filtration. (Sobolik)
Besides specific stylistic choices, the general pacing of the film communicates its message, however obliquely. There are at least two minutes spent on arranging the execution chamber; we see the yellow plastic pan that will collect Jacek’s final bowel movement thrown haphazardly into the trapdoor below the noose. Conversely, Kieślowski sees no need to depict the arrest or the trial. The action leading up to the murder tells that entire story precisely so Kieślowski can focus on other, more psychological events and exchanges, like a wrenching final conversation between Balicki and Jacek about burial plots and regret” (Sobolik)
The only details of the trial are second-hand fragments from conversation between Balicki and the prosecutor outside the courtroom. Balicki is distraught; the prosecutor assures him that he delivered one of the most impassioned examinations against the death penalty that he’d ever seen. Balicki says, in this case, he would’ve hoped for a better judge. The only cut between the gruesome strangulation and rock-beating of the taxi driver and the end of the trial is a few minutes in which Jacek drives the cab to a friend’s home, offering to take her anywhere. Being an acquaintance of the cab driver herself, she stares in restrained horror at the devil-head hanging from the rear-view mirror and says, “Where did you get this car?” (Sobolik) The girl provides the audience with a reaction unencumbered by the agonizing exposition — “ [a] reminder that a jury only sees the evidence. In fact, Kieślowski’s omission of the trial allows her to act as a stand-in for the jury in Jacek’s trial. This friend is also an important human connection to the cab driver, since Kieślowski spends much of the film exploring Jacek’s morality for the sake of constructing a clean political statement.” (Sobolik)
According to Sobolik, parallels between the original murder and the resulting execution aren’t subtle, but nor are they annoyingly overt, hitting a didactic sweet spot rare in narrative film. Both victims wear blindfolds. They both cry out in protest, they both struggle, but ultimately succumb to their fate. The cold, inhumane clack of the shoes of the doctor going to check Jacek’s pulse mirrors the dull thud of the rock Jacek uses to ensure the cab driver is dead after minutes and minutes of excruciating strangulation by cheap rope. What resonates most between the two scenes is the stark contrast between the frenzy of limbs and noise before with the stillness and silence after.” (Sobolik)
Kieślowski makes the Polish legal system’s use of capital punishment look like the Code of Hammurabi. The reactionary, primitive qualities of “an eye for an eye” are steeped in this film’s narrative and compounded by the fact that Jacek’s court appointed lawyer becomes his therapist. Kieślowski prioritizes exploring Jacek’s moral complexities and relationships to other characters, thereby complicating what is expected to be a straightforward judgment by the audience. With a detailed, stylistic analysis of a straightforward case study, Kieślowski demands that murder and execution be deemed synonymous. The government’s insistence on separate definitions, as he formally demonstrates, is an illusion designed to instill fear, and is ineffective in protecting the lives of citizens.” (Sobolik)
A Short Film About Killing is the cinema version of the fifth commandment. A simple story of a boy that kills a taxi driver for reasons unknown and is later killed himself by the system. We never find out precisely why the first murder occurs or [at least] we are never told. And that’s -believe it or not, the only film premise for effect. (Sobolik)
The narrative is nothing but a confrontational study of the protracted process of ending someone’s life, whether through casual murder or meticulously calibrated execution. Kieślowski’s masterpiece contributed to a national debate that ultimately ended capital punishment in the country. For who could still justify it after seeing it?
The plots of Decalogue avoided religious postulates and attitudes and as such they were not appreciated by Poles who were usually given dogmatic truths in the shape of a sermon or homily. They seemed to share the opinion of the festival jury in Gdansk where the two theatrical versions were shown.
However, Decalogue received praise with foreign critics and audiences. At the International Film Festival in Cannes, A Short Film About Killing received the Special Award of the Jury for its courage in asking the most important questions and seeking a moral signpost in the modern world. The members of European Film Academy honored the author with their prestigious Felix. (Miczka)
Kieślowski did not change his point of view on film and reality even after political events had paralyzed the social and cultural life in Poland. In the mid-1980s, when a number of ambitious filmmakers aware of social problems decided to stop making films, while others aggressively condemned opposing ideologies -he proclaimed the importance of secrecy to an individual and expressed it well in Bez końca (Without End, 1985). The plot of this film takes place in 1982, just at the beginning of the imposition of martial law. Here, the political discussion was raised to the psychological level and united with the personal drama of a young attorney’s widow. (Miczka)
A day after the funeral ceremony, the dead man returned to reality and began affecting the existence of Dariusz, a young worker who had been charged by the military government with organizing a strike. Three lawyers suggested to him three different courses of defense: The first one was the dead man’s spirit who encouraged Dariusz to stand firm by the values he believed in. The second suggested a compromise (“you should smile hypocritically and leave the prison”), while the third one advised to him express his hatred for the authorities. But Dariusz decided to follow his own opinion which suggested he was neither a coward nor a hero. The widow did not manage to penetrate this matter and failing to find a sense of meaning in her life, finally committed suicide. The last scene showed the couple reunited after death. (Miczka)
The film was neither accepted by the official nor by the underground critics. In Without End, Kieślowski decided to explore the symbolic aspect of the narration and juxtaposed an individual’s fundamental principles and personal loyalties on one hand and the loyalty to the Polish nation and state on the other. Kieślowski wrote the screenplay together with Krzysztof Piesiewicz and that was the beginning of their almost ten-year long collaboration. Later they developed Dekalog (Decalogue, 1988- 1989), a series of ten feature films based on the idea of the ten commandments. Decalogue brought its creators international fame while in Poland they were regarded as controversial artists since they did not “utter the name of God to misuse it.” (Miczka)
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Works cited
devduttblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/short-notes-on-a-short-film-about-killing/.
Frser, Mariam, and Monica Greco. The Body-A Reader. Routledge, 2004.
Haugbolle, Sune. “The (Little) Militia Man.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, pp. 115–139., doi:10.2979/jmiddeastwomstud.8.1.115.
Http://Doubleexposurejournal.com/Krzysztof-Kieslowskis-Short-Film-Killing/.
https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/855/800.
“Krzysztof Kieslowski: A Short Film About Killing.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 24 Feb. 2000, www.theguardian.com/film/2000/feb/24/artsfeatures1.
Sitter, Matthew. “Violence and Masculinity in Hollywood War Films During World War II.” Library and Archives Canada =Bibliothèque Et Archives Canada, 2013.
Stojanova, Christina. “The Great War: Cinema, Propaganda, and The Emancipation of Film Language.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, pp. 131–156., doi:10.1515/ausfm-2017–0006.
Https://Www.slantmagazine.com/Film/a-Short-Film-about-Killing/
