Dan Conley’s Writing Projects

In the course of my many years of Montaigne analysis and study, if I walked away from it with one vital lesson — a lesson I consistently forget and have to relearn — it is this: all human beings are essentially unknowable. Montaigne is an ideal example. Here is a man who

I noted earlier that this is the least popular of the Dekalog episodes. I think this assessment is unfair, but it’s probably one I shared the first time I watched it. This is a much better episode without the suspense elements, without wondering what Ewa is up to or

The central truth of Dekalog 3 is that Janusz and Ewa are drawn to one another and want to be together, even if just for one very long night. But to get to that truth, you have to put up with a lot of lies coming from Ewa, and it’

On IMDB, you can see the viewer ratings assigned to the episodes of basically any series ever aired. For the Dekalog, episode three ranks the lowest of all 10 episodes. I don’t think that’s due to its quality, rather it’s a commentary on its subject matter. First

The Criterion BluRay of The Dekalog includes an interview of Hanna Krall, a Polish journalist and chronicler of Holocaust survivor stories. There’s a wonderful moment in that interview where Krall tells how she wrote to Kieslowski after the “Three Colours” series and said that the people she knows in

I have spent much of the day rewatching the entire Dekalog. This is after a copy of the published screenplays for the series arrived yesterday, which gives me another resource to compare against for these essays. In reading a great deal recently about the series, Kieslowski mentioned that he liked