Krzysztof Kieslowski: Short Nonfiction Films (Patreon)

I could justifiably select Kieslowski to be the Auteur of the Month at some point. I've only seen three of his features (Red, Blue, and The Double Life of Veronique) and I haven't seen them since they were in commercial release. So you can pick your jaw up off the floor: I have never seen any of the Dekalog, or either of its Short Film About offshoots. 

But the DocDays UA film festival has programmed a series of ten early documentaries by Kieslowski, and although it's an uneven selection, most of them are strong, two of them are fantastic, and one of them is now in my top-50 favorite films of all time. Most of these films are available on YouTube, Criterion Channel, or through other portals. But DocDays is presenting new subtitles on 2014 restorations, and I hope the whole collection finds its way to Region 1 DVD sometime soon.

The earliest film selected, From the City of Lodz (1969), is also the weakest. A compact city-symphony that spreads its focus too thin, Lodz takes in factory work, public festivals, architectural shifts, and the municipality's second-city status compared with Warsaw. The most interesting moments involve the boss at a cotton factory alerting the all-women workforce that the ruling Soviet has decided to disband a popular local musical act, the Ciukska Mandolin Orchestra. This cultural affront actually occasions a town meeting, where one bitter pensioner opines, "they take everything away. They may as well just kill us." Art, it seems, is dying everywhere all the time.

Factory (1971) finds Kieslowski really hitting his stride. In just under 20 minutes, we see the daily travails at a steel mill. Brief shots of the production floor are contrasted with a comically interminable staff meeting about falling productivity and various other fowl-ups. The head honcho wants answers, and all his department heads and ministers unwind skeins of corporate-industrial jargon in order to pass the buck. There's discussion of various vital widgets being diverted to Czecholovakia, entire divisions that have been offline for months, and plaintive explanations that those divisions cannot start operating again without those missing widgets. Fans of David Mamet or (especially) Armando Iannucci should watch Factory as soon as possible.

Refrain (1972) offers a brief look at an office of funeral directors, and although it has moments of bureaucratic amusement -- a clerk impatiently explaining that burial plots cannot be purchased until after someone has died -- Kieslowski doesn't bring a lot to the table here.

X-Ray (1974) is somewhat richer, mostly due to its subject matter. Filmed at a rural sanitarium for infirm laborers, X-Ray consists of nearly context-free interviews that gradually make up a picture of Communism's psychological toll. These men are unable to work, and because masculine identity in this culture is based on one's identity as a laborer, these men are lost. One simply pleads with the camera: "I am somebody. I exist."

Probably the most overtly anti-communist film of the bunch, Life Story (1975) (also known as Curriculum Vitae) is another filmed meeting. As he does with his other post-Lodz films, Kieslowski uses a modified version of Direct Cinema (more Allan King than Frederick Wiseman) to take us inside the beige belly of communism, where seemingly benign pencil-pushers hold your future in their breast pockets. This is a disciplinary hearing for a factory worker named Gralak. He has been a good party member but has gotten into trouble, mostly because he resents waste and incompetence and is willing to call his supervisors on the carpet regarding perceived infractions. As Gralak explains himself to a panel of Party Control members, Kieslowski carefully shows us a man's life being destroyed in real time.

Hospital (1977) is one of Kieslowski's strongest short films, an indictment of Second-World inadequacy under the guise of a straightforward institutional profile. Covering 24 hours of activity at a Warsaw trauma hospital, the film is not for the squeamish. It resembles Wiseman's Titicut Follies in its unflinching examination of malfeasance-as-status-quo. The doctors may be doing their best under the circumstances, although some are almost aggressively callous. (A fellow with a broken leg cries out as he moves from a wheelchair to an exam table, and the doctor teases him. "What kind of man are you?") The treatment of various orthopedic calamities borders on the medieval; the setting of bones and insertion of rods looks more like masonry than medicine. If this was standard operating procedure in the Eastern Bloc, I can now recognize The Death of Mr. Lazarescu as the social realism it was.

Kieslowski completed two short docs in 1979. Seven Women of Different Ages (1979) is the kind of film Degas might have made, had he been trapped in Poland's gray, brutalist late 70s. It's just a profile of a ballet studio, with performers and students of different ages (adolescent to adult) being subject to unforgiving physical rigor. Seven Women looks about like any other film about ballet practice, although I suppose one could take the Grand Dame's stentorian conditioning of bodies as communist molding in another form.

The better of his two films from this year, From a Night Porter's Point of View (1979) is an extended visit with a petty martinet. This grumpy old man gets off on writing up railway passengers for minor infractions, calling the cops on kids with long hair, and filing extensive reports detailing all the ways his colleagues fail to toe the line. It's pretty much a perfect metonymic portrait. We learn about this particular fascist, all the while understanding Kieslowski's primary point. Soviet satellite nations were able to function as they did because specimens like this guy were plentiful. They surely moved up through the ranks (and this gentleman is promoted to being a prison guard), but for them, being a boot-licking snitch was truly its own reward.

Kieslowski saved the best for last. I cannot recommend Talking Heads (1980) highly enough, despite the fact that, alas, David Byrne is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Kieslowski trains his camera on ordinary Poles, ages pre-verbal infant to 100, asking them two very basic questions. Who are you? What do you want? (Rest assured Nardwuar has seen this film.) Each respondant's year of birth is shown onscreen, as Kieslowski takes us from the present day (well, 1979) back into the late 19th century. How have identities and desires changed? Turns out, there are no generalizations to be made. Some people are satisfied (sometimes smugly so), while other people are striving and dreaming, and still others have given up all hope. Conceptually, Talking Heads is an abbreviated version of Chris Marker and Edgar Morin's 1963 documentary Le Joli Mai, but where that film was rambling by design, this is a concentrated biopsy of humanity as contained within a single nation at a particular time. It's a masterpiece.