The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

78 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
Kieslowski about his minimal narrative style when asked about
what the film school in Lodz taught him: “The Film School taught
me how to look at the world. It showed me that life exists and that
people talk, laugh, worry, suffer, steal, in this life, that all this can be
photographed and that from all these photographs a story can be
told. I didn't know that before” (Kieslowski in Danusia Stok, 1993:
46-47).
In this little film the story told by a montage of situations and
small human portraits is one of old people on trial. It is also a story
showing how these people simply don’t understand how they can
be on trial and the kind of system that produces this atmosphere of
trial. But the camera reveals this and moves from the surface and
deep into the heart of bureaucracy. Words, images, gestures, facial
expressions, body language and so on, everything speaks in this
film, revealing the system and its inhumane and ‘Kafkaesque’
nature.
The film is clearly divided into three rhetorical and visual
statements and forms. The first part of the film is characterized by its
impersonal, off-screen dialogue between clients and clerks. The
dialogue is about forms and stamps that are missing; formulas and
paperwork seem to rule everything here. No dialogue ever deals
with the real social problems, but only with correct or incorrect procedures.
So it is quite symbolic that the film disembodies the voices
and that the camera at the same time moves around catching short
glimpses of troubled faces, nervous hands fumbling with papers
and so forth. The framing goes from medium to ultra close up,
furthermore underlining the disembodied and alienating treatment
of humans. They never seem to step out as distinct, concrete
persons; they are just clients, faces, and passing things.