The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

86 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
between clerk and client, but for the most part the soundtrack
consists of wild tracks freely cut to picture after the fashion of what
might be called an impressionistic collage. What is important is not
so much any loyalty to the linear stories of those who are being
addressed, filed and discarded like loose papers, but rather loyalty
to the project of capturing the impression of being in that office, of
being efficiently processed or serviced with such frustrating and
unproductive results. The clerks' efficiency keeps the film clipping
along so quickly that when it finally settles on one character, a tall
bald man, and returns to him for four shots, our sympathy for him
seems emphasized and singled out in a unique way. But is he any
different from the others?
In his final shot, this man glances at the camera briefly and
bends the frame of the documentary. Up until this point, a viewer
could easily assume that Urzad was almost entirely shot with a hidden
camera. It epitomizes the purest form of observational documentary
where one suspects that the only directorial manipulation
of the action is through camera placement and editing – no "creationism"
or interventionist direction of the participants seems likely.
Nonetheless, Kieslowski still seems compelled to humbly and honestly
draw attention to the filmmaking process when the eyes of this
one character fall on the lens, and consequently grant the director
'permission' to assert his authorial voice. As a result, the final
sequence of Urzad drives home the film's theme with deft double
entendre: the stacks of files both attest to how the clerks would
answer "what have you done all your life?" and offer a kind of
crowded cemetery where the sum total of people's lives amount not
to headstones, but to shelf after shelf of lifetimes stored in forms,
facts and dotted lines. It is the dates and appointments of the deper-