The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

88 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
While the former Eastern bloc countries seem to represent the
extreme of Kafkaesque officialese, the rest of the world is no
stranger to the kind of bureaucratic agony depicted in Urzad. As a
film production instructor, I have to admit I was heartened to see a
student work so dedicated to the purity of its documentary form
while at the same time concerned with offering a social message of
arguably universal proportions. So few of the students I encounter
are interested in speaking to such grandiose topics as social commentary
or the human condition. Their work barely rises out of the
university milieu in its focus, and only the best of it hints at the level
of self-critique in Kieslowski's short. Add to this that the documentary
is so polluted by fiction filmmaking techniques, journalistic
ethics and now manipulative reality TV practices, that watching
people being themselves instead of seeing characters playing themselves
has become a rare treat.
This, ultimately, is both the appeal and dilemma of every great
documentary: the alluring realism that leads us to conclude we've
witnessed some kind of "truth" about a character or life, at odds
with the nagging questions about just what dubious means the
documentarian used or constructed to lead us to those ends.
Whether Urzad is deceptively simple or simply effective, it remains a
compact and impressive indictment of slow and senseless
bureaucracy, which in many ways seems only to have worsened
over the intervening decades and prompted diagnoses of "rage"
variants rather than the quiet patience exhibited by Kieslowski's
Poles. From our overly litigious present, it is tempting to ponder
Kieslowski's own odyssey through obstacles of paperwork and
permissions to secure the access for shooting Urzad in the first place.