Dan Conley’s Writing Projects

Dekalog 7 has a very interesting premise. It’s an unusual twist on child abduction stories. It is extremely well cast — right down to the little girl looking very much like young man cast as her father. And yet — the episode doesn’t live up to its potential. Kieslowski is

Episode 7 of The Dekalog concerns another emotionally powerful storyline — the abduction of a child. It raises two interesting early impressions that are somewhat in conflict. First, episode 7 has elements of Ingmar Bergman’s films in it. There’s an in-your-face emotional aspect to the episode that is unlike

I’m working on a theory that I introduced in my Stendhal wrap-up essays that I believe applies across my work. It goes something like this: Many of the most important decisions we make in life are ultimately inexplicable. They are driven by feelings, held deeply in our nervous system,

In the film that spun off from this episode — “A Short Film About Love” — Magda responds to Tomek’s self harm with a period of self reflection, followed by her own romantic feelings for him. There is a little evidence for this in the episode, enough for the actors to

One of the interesting similarities between Montaigne, Shakespeare and Tolstoy is that all of them have flashes of romanticism — especially when speaking of youth — but then deeply unhappy descriptions of marriages, both in stories and personal reflections. Montaigne was often reticent to admit to having any romantic feelings at all.

Recently I did some work on my Stendhal project, pulled all the pieces together and wrote a front-piece connecting essay. I liked how that all turned out and mused elsewhere on this site that maybe I could go back to Stendhal and complete a book project on “On Love.” After