La gare

"Railway Station" is a short documentary directed by the great Krzysztof Kieslowski in which he captures in less than fifteen minutes of projection a bureaucratic day in the life of many people waiting for a train in a crowded and confusing railway station in Poland.

Nothing works at this station, people get tired and frustrated because the train takes too long to appear, and they are warned all the time about the delay of the so-called fast train; there's countless troubles in the ticket counter, the attendants are bureaucratic and do a terrible job not helping people. And at last but not least there's the eye who sees everything at the station: a camera. Not Kieslowski's camera, but one surveillance camera that every time it appears on the screen makes the music grow very darker, tense, meaning that something doesn't feel quite right. Perhaps this is the director's vision about the paranoid Communism regime present in Poland at the time, a regime that kept everything under control, suspicious of everything and everyone.

Looking to the documentary as a whole it's a good piece of filmmaking that allows us to see how Poland was during the beginning of the 1980's. It doesn't include any political statements but I know that there's something related to it, you can feel that just by watching. During moments I thought that some of the people that appeared in this film were actors, for some odd reason, perhaps the way they talked, or some of the situations were so unbelievable that it looked something that was taken out of some movie e.g. the scenes at the counter but it was the country's situation which was bad during those days and gives that impression of being "staged".

My favorite technical aspect of "Railway Station" was the excellent black and white cinematography photographed by Witold Stok. That was something very beautiful and magnificent to look at, with a skillful use on many night scenes, giving a nice emphasis on the lights.

It might not be a brilliant documentary but it gets pretty close. 7/10

This proved to be one of the director’s last shorts which, again, follows the model of his previous efforts – depicting the buzzing activity at a public place (the title is fairly explicit as to which); incidentally, it’s the shortest of the three included on Disc 2 of the R2 DVD of Kieslowski’s THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE (1991). Again, it inserts a bit of humor into the situation – as the workers at the station clash with their prospective clients (the booths separating them make communication difficult to begin with) over ticket-prices, oblique policies, presumed destinations, delayed arrivals, even storage lockers, etc. All of which is caught by security cameras installed at every possible angle of the station (picking up the various people as they wait, some taking this opportunity to have lunch) – with the score, for some reason, turning sinister every time they appear (perhaps the director didn’t approve of such ‘oppressive’ devices?).

This documentary short by Krzysztof Kieslowski is set in a railway station. People are staring at the television, where a meeting by the government proposes to increase agricultural production by some unspecified nature, notes that many small economies add up to vast savings, and then, one by one, people complain that trains are being cancelled. Why is that? The official reason, it is explained, is that there are no passengers.

Indeed there aren't, since there are no trains arriving or departing. I was reminded of the old saying that at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. In Communist Poland, would trains hewing to schedule be seen as a sign of counter-revolutionary neo-Fascism?

Possibly. Let us order the sun and rain and the winds, so that more food will grow! But by all means, don't let the trains run on time; only G*d can make that happen, and officially there is no G*d.

And now an English movie.