The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 85
Kieslowski's Grey
Laurence Green
Much has been made, by critics and by Kieslowski himself, of the
dramatic shift in Kieslowski's career in the early 1980s away from
documentaries and towards fiction filmmaking. This late and definitive
career shift makes Kieslowski a special case in the familiar
trend of looking back at an artist's early works once s/he has secured
widespread acclaim, and thus justifies taking this to the
extreme of evaluating Kieslowski's student films, where there is
plenty to impress.
Urzad is a remarkable little film and a textbook example of the
unity of form and content. Edited with an officiousness that eloquently
expresses the daily routine, the film seems to pile up helpless
faces and bureaucratic requests with the same callous repetition
that characterizes the tone of the faceless clerks. We do see their
faces in fact, but the film's habit of repeatedly cutting away to shuffling
papers, to the details of the official business going on, to the
backs of heads, chiefly offers us glimpses of fragmented tasks, individuals,
and lives.
A series of desperate and confused clients stand waiting behind
the peep-hole barrier as the soundtrack keeps up a steady pace of
absurdist jabber, but in fact, for such a short film, with so many cuts,
there is still a surprising amount of waiting; while tea is made and
pencils are sharpened, the line up is left at the mercy of policies and
peons. Busy and lively editing seems a counterpoint to the inertia
that greets virtually every administrative request essentially to insert
square pegs into round holes. In the middle of the film, there
are a few lines of synch dialogue in a couple of the exchanges