Stardust | Freeing spirituality: the cinema of Kieślowski

When we equate spirituality with an institutionalised religion, we narrow its scope far too much. Religion is, of course, one of the most powerful forms spirituality has taken throughout history; yet the relationship people build with transcendence, meaning, death, conscience, compassion and the mystery of their own existence actually extends across a much wider field, without the mediation of institutional religions.

• A person can have an experience that goes beyond the limits of their own being without recourse to the idea of a god; in the responsibility they feel before another person’s pain, in the way they love, in their forgiving, in their mourning, in their relationship with nature, even in the smallest kindness shown to someone else without expecting anything in return, they can open up a vast spiritual space for themselves.

The real point here is not to do away with spirituality but to free it from institutional ownership. An institution tends to turn experience into rule, searching into answer, conscience into command. Spirituality, on the contrary, is born of the capacity to live with questions: rather than seeking definitive answers to questions such as “Who am I?”, “How should I live?”, “Where does my responsibility towards others begin and end?”, “What shall I do with pain?”, “How shall I live with the knowledge of death?”, “What is the limit of love?”, it is concerned with the quality of the relationship a person forms with these questions.

At this point, an interesting affinity between Sufism and contemporary secular spirituality emerges. One of the strongest currents in Sufism is that it thinks of truth less as a set of rules imposed from outside than as a lived state. Compassion, surrender, the restraint of the ego, the self giving up its own centrality, the transformation of one’s relationship with the other, and love carrying a person beyond themselves are all parts of this experience. Modern individual spirituality likewise, though it sets out from a different conceptual world, arrives at a similar place: a person ceasing to regard themselves as the centre of the universe.

In this context, the concept of God also takes on a different form. Alongside the metaphysical debate built on the existence or non-existence of God, the question of how a person is to live in the world takes its place. One person may believe in God and live a life far removed from compassion, while another, without holding any religious belief, may live with an extraordinary sensitivity to the fragility of the person in front of them. In this way the measure of spirituality shifts from the declaration of faith to the way of life. The sacred comes down from the sky and settles right in the middle of everyday life.

The great strength of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema emerges precisely here. Kieślowski describes himself as agnostic. Although he created a work like Dekalog, which takes the Ten Commandments as its direct starting point, he does not turn Catholic teaching into the moral authority of his films. As we see in his own account, what shaped his moral world was not so much Catholicism as the experience of independent thought.

When he speaks about God, too, he avoids any firm theological definition, behaving as if he were talking about an indeterminate “something” whose presence he senses. His films, by contrast, constantly circle around metaphysical questions. In Kieślowski’s universe, then, the crown of “ethics” is returned to the king who deserves it: spirituality.

This is why Dekalog is in fact a more interesting undertaking than a screen adaptation of the Ten Commandments. The commandments stop being verdicts to be confirmed at the end of the films and become questions directed at human life. Kieślowski does not even want to give the films the names of the commandments. He believes that naming something would close off the viewer’s room for interpretation.

• For him, cinema is less a means of passing judgement than a way of leaving people alone with their own conscience. This choice is the cinematic form of morality freeing itself from the institutional.

In Dekalog I, the central question we face is not whether or not to believe in God. The father understands the world as a calculable system; with computers, mathematics and rational calculation he produces the illusion that he can bring life’s uncertainty under control. With the child’s death, this confidence collapses. In this sense, the film does not call the audience to religion. It does something more radical: it reminds people of the limits of their knowledge. Spiritual experience begins not where the answer is found, but where the answer is not enough.

Dekalog II carries this idea into another area. A pregnant woman asks the doctor to tell her definitively whether her seriously ill husband will live or die; the doctor’s answer will decide the fate of the child she is carrying. The doctor is suddenly drawn to the point where medical knowledge and moral responsibility intersect.

• This is exactly where the Kieślowski character exists: in a moment of decision that no institution, profession or moral law can fully resolve. Spirituality thus moves beyond an abstract experience of transcendence and becomes the responsibility one feels before another person’s life.

A Short Film About Killing places the same question inside violence. One person kills another, and then the state kills that person. While Kieślowski sets the physical weight of both deaths before the audience, he does not allow morality to be equated with the law. The law may perhaps deliver its verdict, but the questioning of conscience goes on. The tension between the state’s legal authority and one human being’s absolute power over another’s life makes the limits of institutional morality visible.

A Short Film About Love, for its part, considers spirituality through the transformation of desire. At first, Tomek’s gaze towards Magda is built on possessing, watching and secretly controlling. Over time, desire evolves towards accepting another person’s existence. The transformation here is a passage from seizing the object of love to being able to see its fragility. For Kieślowski, the moral dimension of love is born precisely in this passage.

This idea becomes even clearer in the Three Colours trilogy. Taking the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, Kieślowski lifts them out of political slogans and carries them into individual life.

Of Blue, he himself says that the freedom in question is not so much political freedom as “an individual, deep freedom”. At first, Julie understands and lives freedom as complete release from all ties. When she loses her husband and her child, she tries to leave behind her past, her belongings, her relationships, in short her entire identity. She imagines that once she is wholly cleansed of her relationships she will reach a pure, liberated self, but instead she discovers that her own existence is woven together with others. Absolute independence gradually turns into a void. By the end of the film, freedom thus takes on another meaning: the freedom to form bonds.

This is why the hymn to love from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, which we hear at the end of the film, is of central importance. Agape, unlike the possessive desire of eros, is a form of love that asks for nothing in return and can place the other’s existence before its own interest. Julie’s journey moves from loss to agape, from an existence closed in on its own pain to one that can once again touch the lives of others.

Red is, in turn, perhaps the most mature form of this idea. The relationship between Valentine and the old judge does not turn into one of the familiar forms of romantic love. A stranger and stronger bond develops between them: the ability to see each other, to listen, and to bear witness to another’s life. For years the judge has listened in on people’s telephone conversations; in other words, he has heard other people’s lives but has been unable to connect with them.

Valentine teaches him a different way of listening. Surveillance gradually becomes witness; knowledge becomes compassion. In this context, the idea of fraternity also shifts from a political principle to an ethical relationship. The unexpected closeness that forms between two strangers makes visible one of the most fundamental movements of spirituality: the self reaching beyond its own limits towards another.

• This is also why the coincidences that recur again and again in Kieślowski’s films matter. Catching or missing a bus, a telephone ringing, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the paths of two strangers crossing… Behind these there is no clearly defined God. And yet the world does not appear to be a realm of purely mechanical causality either.

In The Double Life of Véronique, the way two women sense each other without knowing of each other’s existence creates the feeling that we are part of a web of connections beyond rational explanation. Rather than explaining this realm, Kieślowski leaves it open. He associates his own cinema with questions rather than answers, after all; the attitude of “I have no answers, but I know how to ask questions” lies at the heart of his ethical aesthetic. It is right here that the core concepts of spirituality in Kieślowski’s cinema come into focus: agape, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, responsibility, witness, encounter, and the ability to see the other’s fragility.

• None of these require great heroics. Kieślowski’s people live in ordinary flats, go shopping, go to work, fall in love, cheat, feel jealous, make mistakes, end up alone. The spiritual simply rises out of this ordinariness. Helping a stranger, listening to someone’s pain, reconsidering a verdict already given, being able to give up one’s own desire, paying close attention to another person’s life…

It is right here that spirituality comes down from the sky to the earth… Not because the human has taken the place of God, but because room is made for transcendence within people, between people, and in the fragile space of encounters. This, after all, is where spirituality frees itself from the institutional. Here faith turns from a matter of belonging into a way of living; morality from a set of rules into an encounter of conscience; goodness from an identity into action. A person builds their moral world not by declaring themselves a “good person”, but by what they do at the moment they encounter another human being.

This is why Kieślowski’s camera is always looking at faces. He searches for the great metaphysical questions in the small moments of everyday life. In this space he turns spirituality into a unique experience, one in which a person goes beyond the limits of their own self and makes room for the life of another being. Rather than settling whether God exists or not, he sets before us the most powerful ethical question the idea of God has carried throughout history, and so sets agape in motion:

“How important is another person’s life to you?”