SOURCE: "Testament of the Father: Kieslowski's The Decalogue," in Film Criticism, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Winter, 1997–98, pp. 51-65.

In the following essay, Perlmutter asserts, "Although glimmers of hope and oxymoronic moments of a kind of desperate joy temper the suffering throughout the ten films [of Kieslowski's The Decalogue, their message is clear—the Ten Commandments exist in our consciousness but are most often beyond our realization."]

The Decalogue marks an important midpoint in Krzysztof Kieslowski's career. As a kind of serialized melodrama, it consolidates his move from documentary to fiction after he first explored the disadvantages of the documentary form (the "truth-telling" genre) in his early fiction film, Camera Buff. The ten episodes are also building-blocks for the four feature films—The Double Life of Veronique and Blue, White and Red—that follow. Similar narrative situations are fleshed out; character types and visual forms persist as thematic moral connotations...