Short Film Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

This article focuses on production issues relating to the shoot, the disjunction of sound and image, several interpretive parameters, and the running time of Urzad.

This article identifies those film-makers who supervised Kieślowski when he was working on Urzᶏd. It demonstrates that he creatively surpassed his documentary tutors’ tactics of portraying the communist society and this is why the short’s caricature of bureaucracy has stood the test of time.

This article focuses on the mutual interest of Kieślowski and his mentor Karabasz in undistinguished characters captured ‘in depth rather than breadth’. Faces shown in close-ups tell the story of ‘irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face’.

The film was shot under the strong influence of its artistic supervisor, Kazimierz Karabasz, the leading documentary film-maker in Poland of 1960s. Like Karabasz in his short docs, Kieslowski decided to film a cyclically repeating event, allowing for penetrating enquiry before shooting and writing a detailed script.

This article will discuss The Office as a Polish take on bureaucracy. For that I will locate Kieślowski’s film in a wider historical context, such as the ideologies of Romanticism and communism, which greatly affected Polish attitudes to the state and its institutions.

This article considers the multi-levelled contrast in Urzᶏd between the worlds of petitioners and clerks; its multiplication of individual forms to simultaneously absurd, metaphysical and political effect; and its links to the ‘Cinema of Moral Anxiety’, A Short Film About Love (1988) and the Kafkaesque in Kieślowski’s work in general.

Two shots of a pencil being sharpened (Shots 11 and 13) help to convey a sense of bureaucratic malaise and menace. This article focuses primarily on Shots 10–14 in order to demonstrate how the film’s direct cinema-style editing gives added meaning to an otherwise seemingly objective, mundane, quotidian office activity.

In Urzad, sounds and images often uncouple viewers’ ears and eyes; the film’s sounds often do not issue from what viewers see in the frame. This article will explore these effects and what they mean in the film’s documentary and bureaucratic contexts.

This article proposes that in The Office Kieslowski uses visual fragmentation and asynchronous sound to express an epistemological doubt. The film’s disjunctive form represents the impossibility of a rational depiction of the world of a communist bureaucracy. Instead, only an archive of images and sounds can be compiled.

The disjunction of the visual and auditory elements of the film creates an impression that voices are totally independent of their sources. The dominant voice of a young clerk contrasted with calm, mumbling utterances of old petitioners becomes an acousmêtre and a representation of the system.

Viewing Urzᶏd as a film school production, this article focuses on Kieslowski’s ingenious use of meagre resources to create a critical view of Polish bureaucracy, despite his inability to shoot synchronous sound when making this film.

How does one represent loneliness on film and make it tangible? Doing so implies the choice of a specific space, entering the main character’s inner thoughts and guiding the spectator’s gaze by alternating subjective shots with pseudo-objective close-ups. And here, the film-maker deftly avoids melodrama by resorting to irony.