The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

80 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
stacks of papers bulge from every shelf. First the shots from this
archive come in very short sequences, like inserts in the ongoing
images from the office. But gradually the archive files become the
main character, so that human and social life become totally
alienated and disembodied. Visually all human life disappears and
is substituted by bureaucratic stacks of papers, and this visual
metaphor is furthermore marked by sound manipulation.
Just before we enter the archive a particular, absurd kind of
dialogue takes place in which the clerk states that in order to get a
pension one must fill in a form where everything one has ever done
in life, all of one’s jobs and places of work should be reported. These
sentences are repeated again and again until the archive seems to
echo these words. It is as if life is buried in these archives, trying to
get out, but in vain. Instead, just before the end a door is slammed
very hard and everything sort of closes down.
The documentary voices of Kieslowski
Kieslowski’s film The Office is a clever documentary film with a
sharp but subdued political message and critique of a communist
bureaucracy. The film doesn’t speak criticism but shows it indirectly
through the whole montage and visual style and framing. On the
surface this is just a report on and observation of Polish everyday
life in the 60s, but in reality it is a death sentence for and burial of a
society in which systems and procedures are superior to humans.
But even though it is a specific, social critique of Poland in 1966
under communism, it is also a more general and existential portrait
of bureaucracy at all times and in all kinds of societies.
The same kind of almost tongue-in-cheek strategy is found in a
much stronger form in some of Kieslowski’s documentaries from