The Decalogue
Tonight, at the meeting of the new CITA (Christians in Theatre Arts) chapter, we're going to be watching one of the films from Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue.
My friend Jeffrey Overstreet who does the popular Film Forum web site over at ChristianityToday.com, first introduced me to The Decalogue a few years ago. I've not seen all of them, but the ones I've seen are like good food--they stick to the bones. These stories are classic example of show, not tell, drawing inspiration from the Ten Commandments, never creating an explicit one-on-one correspondence between story and particular commandment. Instead, they do exactly what I was blogging about the other day: they tell it slant. Some of the reading I've done about these films leads me to believe that the stories were built in very much the way Lee and Jan Bachelor said not to do it--they start with theme. (Actually, all Lee and Jan said was that theme was not a good place to start.) But the themes travel into us just how the Bachelor's said they should, by way of character, these ponderous, tormented people facing ethical dilemmas which would make most of us weak in the knees.
Tonight, we're watching the last in the series, ("Thou shalt not covet") dealing with a pair of brothers who come into an inheritance worth millions. Should make for interesting discussion, and hopefully will move the discussion about faith and art in the theatre in the right direction...
2:54:18 PM
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