L'hôpital

A very raw and intense look at a group of doctors who work their weekly 24 hour shifts. Starting in the morning the film follows the doctors as they treat various patients and accident victims. Laced with cynicism towards the Polish medical system, Hospital shows the non-stop grind and extreme pressures the doctors are put under. If you are squeamish, be warned.

A pure documentary made in the classic style without commentary covering 32 hours (one shift) in an orthopaedic wing of a busy hospital. This is another workplace documentary where the point of view is from the workers, in this case the doctors and nurses. The patients are barely glimpsed and only heard talking to the doctors. Most cases are surgical in nature, especially the dire emergency cases and there are many scenes in the operating room.

It might seem that the doctors are operating in the most primitive condition but this is because people are unaware of what actually goes on in an operating room. A steel rod is inserted in a thigh to straighten a broken tibia and knocked into place with a steel mallet. In another shot a mallet breaks while hammering something else into a patient (it looks like a cold chisel) and a substitute is used, the flat side of some other tool obviously used for something completely different. Recently I had a liver biopsy done and in this age of marvelous machines which go ping and other medical miracles I was somewhat surprised to find that the instrument for the procedure looked like a woodworker's awl of a triangular cross section which was simply rammed into my side and withdrawn. This is why patients are given general anesthetics rather than locals because if they were given locals they'd loose control of their bowels and die to see what was being done.

The doctors and nurses take this all in their stride and develop early in their careers an attitude of having seen it all and just get on with their work. They have a special sense of humor from the mordancy of the work. The delivery of some liverwurst prompts one doctor to phone a colleague inviting them to the feast. If you think this is all primitive and somehow bespeaks a certain lack of something then you've missed the point. Medicine is more than a bunch of fancy machines and super drugs - it's these people and Kieslowski, working in a minor key, celebrates this.

In a very Kieslowskian coincidence, according to Annette Insdorf, though offered the services of foreign hospitals, Kieslowski insisted on having his heart bypass surgery in a Warsaw hospital where he died under anesthesia, the story goes, because the staff couldn't handle an newly arrived machine from the west.

The best of eight shorts I watched in quick succession is this ‘day in the life of a hospital’ film; it uses the hours of the day as a guide-line for the development of particular situations. The subject is actually pretty grim as various people come in for serious bodily treatment, sometimes parting with a limb in the process: the most excruciating sequence involves a graphic knee-cap operation (which, however, unexpectedly descends into black comedy as instruments get lodged into the bone-structure or else come apart!); interestingly, there’s even an investigation into the case of a patient who has thrown herself out of the fourth floor of the building! At 20 minutes, it’s the longest of the lot – but this actually benefits one’s appreciation of the nonstop goings-on at such an obviously sensitive place.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's short television documentary about 24 hours in a hospital operating center is horrifying in its lack of humanity. At times it seems the doctors are more interesting in the bad food and what happened to the last cup of coffee than in their patients. They run out of sterile cotton wool, they break hammers, they tell patients they're being sissies when they complain of pain. It is not until the last couple of minutes that a patient's name is mentioned, and their exhaustion and frustration becomes evident. Still, they soldier on, operating on patient after patient, like each is a busted automobile they've got to get running again.