Krzysztof Kieślowski

Water takes four of his ten planets, earth three, fire two and a single one air, with four of the ten fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Venus spread across eighteen degrees of Cancer. Mercury was the only retrograde planet. The record says Kieslowski made the Dekalog for Polish television, ten hour-long films on the commandments, then the Three Colours trilogy, and that he announced his retirement and died two years later at fifty four.

Venus sits sixty degrees from Saturn at just over a quarter of a degree, and the reading is steady affection: relationships that last, and an unfashionable preference for the durable over the exciting. A director who made ten hour-long films about the commandments, for television, chose the durable subject over the exciting one and then did it ten times. Saturn also sits in easy contact with Neptune at just over a degree, imagination made durable: artists who finish things, which the record confirms twice and then ends with a retirement.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Uranus at under a quarter of a degree, thought jumping the rails: nervous tension, changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody else has the context to follow. Mercury itself was retrograde, on the fourteenth degree of Cancer. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and that costs the tightest contact in the chart along with one more. In a director the record gives thirteen films and a retirement, being right ahead of the context is the one clause the Dekalog could fairly claim.

He died at Warsaw on 13 March 1996, at fifty four, and the sky that day is remarkably crowded at very small orbs. Three separate contacts landed at one hundredth of a degree each: Jupiter opposite his natal Mercury, Neptune sixty degrees from his natal Mars, and Pluto in easy contact with its own natal place. Three at a hundredth of a degree on one day is a result worth printing and worth bounding, because a transit sky offers a hundred possible pairings against forty five in a birth chart, and three of them landing that close is luck rather than meaning. The Moon was at its last quarter and forty two per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.