Today marks the end of the 5-month long Krzysztof Kieslowski Retrospectives throughout North America (Vancouver, Ottawa, Denver, Boston, St. Louis, Seattle, Montreal, Hartford and Chicago), organised by Polish Cultural Institute.
Midrash and Modernity: Art After the Holocaust (Monica Osborne, Tikkun, 26/12/06)
Midrashic on many levels, The Decalogue responds to those who view the commandments as sharply delineated moral proscriptions, and collapses them into one ethical imperative: Love your neighbor. The film forces the viewer to re-think the commandments in ethical terms rather than with the historical tendency to insist on literal interpretations. For instance, devotion to “the law” can lead to greater ethical transgressions. Kieslowski is reading the Ten Commandments midrashically by questioning their meaning and significance, identifying their gaps and ambiguities, and responding to them with contemporary narratives that extend—rather than re-write—the original premise and promise of the commandments.
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I have to admit that while I understand more or less what Osborne's trying to say in the article, I am not sure I understand what the concept "contemporary midrash" means.
Sean Axmaker talked to Tom Tykwer in Tom Tykwer and the Collector's Compulsion (GreenCine 27/12/06)
Axmaker: Heaven is directed from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Perfume is an adaptation of a novel. All your previous films have been your own original scripts, if I'm not mistaken.
Tykwer: Well, this is also my script. I mean, I had two co-writers, but I really put a lot of effort into making it. I can't really think of myself not being involved at all in the writing. But, yes, I know what you mean. It's different material. Also, in Heaven, we'd been really working a long time on this script together, but I didn't want the credit for it. It is really only the material itself that attracts me because it needs to touch something that I have a very subjective and personal relationship to. Kieslowski's script just did it. It was one of those scripts that I read and I felt like, "Wow! That's the one. That's the script I've always wanted to write but was never able to."
Axmaker went on and asked two more Kieslowski-related questions, but - perhaps understandably - Tykwer preferred to focus on his latest finished project - Perfume.
