Tu ne tueras point

Impressive and thought provoking, this film debates the age-old topic of capital punishment. Here though, there is a difference. The morality of state-killing is critiqued alongside an analysis of individual agency - when a person kills another, apparently from a desire to murder, are there other motives and factors that bring him/her to this position? Are we all, given certain circumstances, capable of killing?

This tantalising and worrying notion has been considered elsewhere, and Camus' 'The Outsider' is a good example. Here, there are many parallels with Kieslowski's film: that a desire to kill - and killing itself - can be driven by a range of factors - some banal, some traumatic, and not all by any means within the control of the protagonist.

The bleakest, most powerful of Kieslowski's Dekalog series opens with half the screen black, and the other half full of a cat hanged by the neck from a street railing. Children scamper off in the background, laughing. The words of the title appear over the black. Bam. We're in. And we're not allowed out of this bleak, miserable world until the end credits. We must crawl through a world where humour is exiled and bitterness and cynicism reign, with our eyes fitted with lenses hand-painted by the director, turning Warsaw into a jaded defeated landscape of dirty sepias and dishwater greys. The story is simple; a young man kills a taxi driver and is, in turn, killed by the state. Just as the title says. There is no humour, no light relief. It's awful, somehow beautiful, constantly disturbing. It's dirty and tawdry. While cinema barrages us daily with glib murders by the bucketful, Kieslowski gives us just two, and shows us killing for what it is: a bare foot emerging from a shoe & sock as a dying man writhes; blood and urine dribbling into a plastic tray under the gallows. A film which haunts.

Have you ever just want to lash out at somebody because emotions have been building up inside you for so long? This is what A Short Film About Killing is about. Perfectly executed and realistically pictured. The pacing is phenomenal, the excitement building up to every scene is breath taking and the way the film portrays youth, adults and the sad depravity of humanity is outstanding.

Beyond words, A Short Film About Killing is undoubtedly one of the best films I've seen. Though the subtitles, for English and non-Polish viewers, mildly take away from the metaphoric scenes, this film is beyond fantastic. Very much worthy of all the praise and love that this great film has received.

Kieslowski did something essential, important; he invented something delicate in vision. It is a way of placing self so that the world appears to us as abstract but real. But rich, not simple. Textured, in such a way that the textures are in the environment, rather than objects in the environment.

This is so obvious a place to be that we forget that it was invented, not discovered. Though almost no one else achieves this balance in art, ever, it has become already something we find naturally in ourselves.

The way he achieved this was to divide his creative self, I believe. One part, he kept to himself and used in the ordinary way we do, stumbling into insightful pleasure. The other part he gave to his creative partner and lover and completely bonded the two. In practical terms, his partner created the situations and ordinary narrative shape. Dialogue.

Kieslowski was then free to shape the cinematic environment. In an ambitious project, he worked with what we call short form in ten related small films made for TeeVee. These are amazingly rich, experimental, successful. They are where he found and gave us that balance between outside and inside: observation and intimacy, narrative fold that vanishes.

But at the same time, he knew they were only sketches of what could be. He needed to take that careful balance into the long form. Now this is a major challenge, because all of a sudden the narrative becomes a spine, not a melody. It becomes the path in the environment. The environment in his carefully conceived balance now has to be dynamic. He did later achieve this in "Three Colors," one of the most important adventures in cinema.

The way he got there was by taking two of the ten decalogue films and making them long form projects. He did not do this — as is generally believed — by simply adding footage to make a short film longer. He completely reimagined the thing from scratch. It is, in fact wholly different, though all the bits of the small project are in it, they are now part of a flow. Though the thing is longer, there are many more mysteries, more story not exposed but placed in the space alone. There is a hint of multiple observation.

There is meaning now, in the car door that mysteriously closes as we see the killer dragging the body to the water.

We owe this man, this project, this killer a lot.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I am sure this is not the most depressing film ever made, I am sure that somewhere, some time, some one has made a more distressing and emotionally powerful look at humans in all there glory. I'm sure people have endeavoured to make a film that makes a city (in this case Warsaw) look bleaker and darker. And I'm sure that this isn't the most painful spiral downhill voyage any character has ever made on celluloid. I'm also sure that this movie is the darkest movie on every level I have ever seen.

The director uses dark filters at time to make this movie almost black, but all that is does is replicate the feel of the material. Which was essentially an anti capital punishment movie. We follow a young man's trip to the dark side, troubled by an unnamed past this movie is a lot like The Machinist or Requiem for A Dream, we can see this man faltering and we feel helpless. The movie is compelling the same way a car wreck is.

You shouldn't be able to watch a movie this black, from the start with a cat in a terrible position to the end with a human in a terrible position, this is only a film that could have been made in Europe. Humans are painted in a despicable way, but it's the city of Warsaw that looks like it's about to grab you at any moment.

This is a very visual way of telling a story, words are almost not necessary throughout the whole film, except a brilliant conversation between lawyer and client. And another brilliant thing about this movie is there is not a "the capital punishment law is wrong" speech by a lawyer to be seen, the movie tells you what it wants you to know without a lawyer ramming in down your throat.

Subtle is best. And in this case a picture does tell a thousand words.

This is a slow burning painfully beautiful look at killing, and if you can sit through its 80 minutes of bleakness, you may never forget its imagery.