The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 81
the 70s. Most directly this can be seen in From a Night Porter’s Point
of View, where the main character embodies the controlling, bureaucratic
mentality of the system. What seems to be a neutral and even
empathetic portrait at the beginning of the film gradually becomes
the revelation of a more and more fanatic and cruel control freak.
The concrete observational documentation of this porter who not
only performs his control at work, but also expands his wish to
control and suppress to all aspects of private life and leisure time,
therefore becomes a symbol for a whole society and its ruling class.
The lack of distance and explicit critique makes the film’s message
even stronger and more shocking because the filmic identification
process is used to create distance and dislike.
It is the same mechanism that gives us a really scary lesson in
Curriculum Vitae, in which it is gradually revealed how far a real
party committee is willing to go in its personal persecution of a
fictionally constructed life story and person. What the film actually
demonstrates is that the whole thing, also in the actual historical
trials against people who did not submit completely to the system,
was a more or less fictional construct.
A very strong documentary film from 1980 is Station (Dworzec);
again, on one level this is a very lyrical and poetical observation of
people coming and going at the central Station in Warsaw, people
interested in ordinary things and each other, but at the same time it
is a film demonstrating the ‘big brother’ tendencies of Polish society
just nine years before the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The
film jumps between a big television screen in the waiting hall where
the system addresses the people with obvious propaganda and
constructed news, the surveillance cameras at the station, and
everyday life. Just as in The Office, the observation of reality is