Le bureau

Urzad (office) is a nice documentary film directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.Although it is a film about Polish bureaucratic system,it has universal resonance as bureaucratic setups are same all over the world.We all know them as absolutely corrupt,inhuman and sadistic. Kieslowski shows us that a bureaucratic setup is hard,harsh and unjust for common people.Some of the most common,daily cases which we see include an old woman who would like to receive money as her mother is dead,an old man trying to get a work certificate.As we watch this film,we get a feeling that Kieslowski is hinting at the possibility of old people asking to be treated in a gentle manner.Kieslowski is suggesting that it is a fact that lives of these hapless old people would be nice if there were less bureaucratic chores around them.One of the most shocking scenes of this 6 minute long documentary shows a heap of dirty government files and documents which have accumulated over a period of time.This is a veritable proof of the fact that many unfulfilled dreams must have also died in these files due to callous apathy of Polish bureaucracy.

This bureaucratic entity that has been filmed for this documentary is a paragon of confusion. People go, expecting to have their problems dealt with. The young lady who is working there has a roadblock ready for any eventuality. It shows the sad faces of the clients as they realize the government they depend on is woefully unable to satisfy even the easiest of problems. Quite well produced and executed.

This is a film Kieslowski made in Lodz Film School. It has a modest concept:a matter-of-fact record of what happens in a government pensions office. The disdainful clerks deliberately brutalize the public to the point of sadistic cruelty for no more reason than to satisfy some dark something where their humanity should be. They all work for an agency which refuses to recognize court orders to give money to legitimate pensioners suggesting a method to this madness. Which comes first - does the organization corrupt its employees or does the demoralized sloth of the employees make a corrupt organization? One interesting thing about what is essentially a single chunk of a film is that there is no guarantee that the sound and the image are from simultaneous shooting but maybe very un-documentary like selected and assembled.

The late, great, Kryzstoff Kieslowski made documentary films for over ten years before his first movie: 'The Office', a short shot while he was still at film school, was his first. It's notable for its fly-on-the-wall style, then something radical and daring rather than the over-familiar device we know today. If you watch this as an extra on the 'No End' DVD, you can also watch an interview with a contemporary (and later collaborator) who explains how Kieslowski realized that in communist Poland, everything was political: 'The Office' consists of a few minutes of film in a social security office, but says a lot about the system as a whole (though as it happens, social security may have been one field where Poland was not so different to the capitalist world). This film made Kieslowski a legend among his peers, for while it is very brief, the appendage of words and images is striking and there are definite hints in the style of his later work (one thinks here of the scenes in the Post Office in 'A Short Film About Love', or in the cinema box office in 'A Short Film About Killing'). Worth five minutes of any Kieslowski fan's time.