The gaze as encounter in Kieslowski’s Decalogue

The central characters in Kieslowski's Decalogue are mostly lonely people. Most of them suffer a deprivation of identity, since identity is mostly formed in relation to the other. Their isolation creates a relatively silent film series in which dialogues are sparse. One of the key elements Kieslowski uses to symbolise the attempts for contact with someone else, is the gaze. Where others as Sobchack have already expounded on the ‘expanded gaze’ between subject and object in the Decalogue, we want to focus on the intra-diegetic gaze of one depicted person at another. It is in their gaze towards other people that they try – most of them helplessly, fruitlessly – to surpass their lack of both a private and a public identity; to feed their search for love and meaning. This is most explicit in Decalogue 6, where a young man spies on his female neighbour with a telescope. Throughout the ten films, Kieslowski plays with the gaze, its character and framing to express both the inner world of the characters, their relation to the outside world and the shifts they undergo.status: publishe