Krzysztof's 10 commandments behind the Wall

There are books and films which, for some reason or another, "change your life". Well, I wouldn't say they actually change your life, but definitely they leave a mark, and, perhaps, they set you to change your life. Before age 16 I never read a book, but when I was in my first year at high school studying Maltese, English and Philosophy I had to read Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, a mammoth book by my former standards. Its effect on me was to change me into a heavy reader, and this happened quite suddenly and almost automatically.

However, if I were to single out the source which could have changed my life, I'd pick Alan Parker's cinematographic presentation of Pink Floyd's The Wall. I watched it for the first time a few days after I enrolled in high school, I was 16 and basically had no idea who I was and where I was heading in life. That period followed my summer of initiation: drink, long nights out, sex, and an encounter with the underworld and its inhabitants. I knew Pink Floyd's The Wall by heart, I had even translated "Another Brick in the Wall" - that famous 1980s students' anthem, to Maltese which we used to sing on the bus going back home when were twelve or thirteen. But the images projected in Parker's film changed my vision of The Wall, from a mere set of hip lyrics and great riffs, to serious analysis of the world around. I watched the film on my own in one September afternoon in 1983, in a practically empty cinema hall which does not exist any more in Valletta, and went back home shaken. Basically, the first thing that set me into thinking was the fact that like Pink, I was the son of a WWII veteran, decorated for service and courage. Unlike Pink's, though, my father did not die in action...but almost. Like Pink, I often spent moments staring at my father's medals which were hung prominently in the entrance to our tiny house (and which I have inherited since and hung them in my living room). Like Pink, I often wondered if I could be a replica of my father's, but never managed since psychologically I was miles away from him, despite the fact that I always held him as my hero. Like Pink I was mother's child. I remember I was so moved by the film and by these observations that I bought chocolates to my parents on returning home, then went straight up to bed weeping!

That was twenty years ago, and since then so many things have changed: my mother passed away, my father is going through the sufferings of old age, and a wall has since been pulled down. A few days ago I bought the live version of The Wall, performed in July 1990 at Potzdamer Platz, shortly after the disappearance of the notorious Berlin Wall. Memories came reeling back, images and shots in flashback form. Images of the wall crumbling down in 1989, images of a bygone era, of a bygone world. And the train of events preceding and following the fall of the wall.

And all this thanks to a film.

Later on, another significant encounter: Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, which led into an assidiuous exploration of this Polish director's ouvre. Watching Kieslowski's Decalogue, however, proved to be another significant event in my life, not so much for the plots as for the drab environment the camera introduces the viewer to: the monotony, the dismal shots of a place which seems to be crying in your face, the brownness and greyness of it all! Kieslowski's Polish films served me as a preview of the things I had to see in the outskirts of Prague, Brno, Warsaw (obviously!), but also in the not-so-romantic parts of Paris, such as the Chinatown area.