Kieślowski's Anti-Hollywood

Some friends and I got together the other night to watch a couple of episodes  of Krzysztof Kieślowski's monumental series, The Decalogue.  I continue to find each viewing a revelation--this after having seen it in its entirety several times.  I am always amazed by Kieślowski's use of close-up--the way his faces are--especially in the film's use of lighting--so reminiscent of High Renaissance and Dutch Master portraiture--an aesthetic in which the face serves as the outward sign of a profound inner life. 

Kieślowski's people--suggesting as they do, humanity in all its potential forms and incarnations--are defiantly anti-Hollywood.  His is a frame that admits the old and young; the angelic and demonic; the beautiful and ugly; the pained and serene; the cruel and kind; the brutalized and convalescent; the uncertain and defiant; the fat and thin; the exhausted and alert; the calculating and naive; the wise and foolish; the comical and serious.  Kieślowski's camera dotes on all of them in a way that suggests a loving fascination with all of life.  These are faces that are--literally and figuratively--free of make-up and artifice, partaking of a realism I wish were more present in mainstream American films.