The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 75
A visual Kafka in Poland
Ib Bondebjerg
The world fame of Kieslowski is tied to his ten-part Decalogue series
(1988) and his film trilogy Trois couleurs: Bleu, Blanc, Rouge (1993-
1994). They represent his move towards a modern European art film
tradition to which he contributed with a strong moral and
existential focus on the distance between despair and hope, isolation
and love, individuality and social responsibility. But even in these
feature films he carries his experiences with him from a Polish
society in which people were suppressed under a communist
bureaucracy. The concrete social, human, and political reality of this
Kafka-like society and bureaucracy dominated his short films and
documentaries from the start of his career as a filmmaker in the
1960s. Here often very simple visual registrations of social life and
Polish institutions were filmed in such a way that a more symbolic
dimension and a message between the lines were visible. In his later
films more existential and symbolic themes dominated and the
narratives were not always directly linked to specific social and
political conditions. But still the settings and atmosphere gave the
narrative space a realistic dimension that draws on the same
experiences as the earlier more political feature films and his
documentary films.
The student documentary film The Office (Urzad, 1966) is a very
early example of the themes and tendencies in Kieslowski’s
documentary production before he became a modern European art
film director in the 1980s. It was in fact his first film along with