The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

82 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
visually and rhetorically organized in such a way that we clearly get
the feeling of being completely controlled and suppressed. This is
very strongly emphasized at the end of the film with sequences shot
from the surveillance camera control room, the point of view of the
anonymous ‘big brother.’
The visual, documentary strategy established in Kieslowski’s
first student film is thus amazingly mature and finished and was
basically used throughout a large part of his other documentary
films between 1960-1980. However, there are other tendencies where
the observational style is used to show people trying to cope with a
completely hopeless system, people doing a job and trying to avoid
being identified with the system. One example is The Mason
(Murarz, 1973), told in the first person by one of the early
communist pioneers from the Stalin era before 1956. He looks back
on his bureaucratic party future with dismay and he goes back to
his job as a mason. His story is ironically told as he attends a May 1
parade with all its bombastic rhetoric and symbolism celebrating the
working class heroes while in fact promoting conformity and a
ruling party class. An even better example is Hospital (Szpital, 1976),
a very realistic portrait of life at a hospital where conditions are
hopeless and can only be survived by black humor and commitment
beyond belief. Here no symbolism is needed – the pictures of reality
loudly speak for themselves.
All in all, Kieslowski's contribution to the modern documentary
film tradition is as important and solid as his feature film
production. There is a clear line from these narratives of reality to
his often very realistic fiction, and there is a just as strong thematic
continuity. Furthermore, the documentary voice is both very critical
and social in its refined ways of getting the message through and at