Chapter 4 The first part of the early short film of personal background (16~18)

The camera here is both intrusive and revelatory, documenting the girl's delivery process in detail, including Jadwiga's pain, the troubles caused by insufficient oxygen pumps, the nurses complaining about the lack of staff, and the buzzing in the background Voice.When Roman learned that he had a daughter, he cried excitedly and told his mother the good news.The film ends with the young parents standing by the crib, talking about what they want her to be when she grows up: smarter than they are, as happy as they are now. After filming wrapped, Kieslowski took a break from documentary work, a decision that didn't surprise us given his guilt over disturbing other people's private lives. "Even a documentary shot has no right to enter the subject that interests me the most: the private life of an individual," he said in an interview with French television. "I'd rather go to the pharmacy and buy some glycerin and stimulate the actors to shed fake tears, And I don’t want to have pictures of other people actually crying, or actually making love, or dying.” This fundamental moral stance led Kieslowski to make feature films for television, the first being 1975’s "personnel".However, looking through the list of his works in the late 1970s, we can still find some short documentaries interspersed with feature films.After filming more than 30 documentaries, he can boldly say: "In terms of cultivating the comprehensive thinking ability of films, filming documentaries is a very good school."

In 1976, he spent almost five months filming "Szpital" (Szpital), a 35-minute film (Annotation: The original text, but the length of the film found in other sources is 21 minutes), in a thrilling way. An uneasy account of surgeons working 32-hour stretches at a Warsaw hospital.The director does not include his own commentary in the film, instead simply presenting the hospital as a workplace: doctors are workers too.As he said years later: "Doctors want to help, but they don't have the means." They smoke, they want to eat (with less success), and they get paid for what they do.Kieslowski established a strict time structure in the film, recording the passage of each hour in detail with subtitles.Thus, the whole film is overwhelmed with a sense of terrible comicality: Overworked doctors do their best, but still face difficulties such as power outages, shoddy equipment and lack of sleep.In an interview with French TV station, the director recalled the reaction of the audience at that time: "They understood that what we were filming was the Poland of 'seeing the whole leopard at a glance', and "Hospital" represented a real Poland on a larger scale. Trying to improve the status quo, but unable to do anything because the whole system is so bad."

Kieslowski does not like to use omniscient voice-over narration when making documentaries. He prefers to simply present the characters, places and processes to the audience. One of the examples of this "objective" stance is Z Punktu Widzenia Nocnego Portiere (1977).Worker Marion Oschuhe is used to strictly observing various disciplines and believes in the truth that "rules are more important than people".In the 17-minute film, he goes from his favorite types of movies to his support for the death penalty. "I don't think he's a bad guy," Kieslowski said. "I think he's just a very normal guy who just happens to think that it would be a good thing to hang people publicly because it would serve as an example and to deter others." Crime... The reason why he has this kind of idea is just because he is not very smart, and his views on life are relatively shallow, and the environment in which he grew up is like this." [13] After the film was completed, Oschuhe himself watched it, And I quite like it.But when Polish TV planned to broadcast it publicly, Kieslowski raised objections, fearing that it might cause trouble for Oschukh. (Wojciech Kilar, famous for his collaborations with Zanussi, Vajda, and others, was used to score the film, incidentally, despite its simplicity.)

I Don't Know (Nie Wiem, 1977) is an even more extreme example, in which Kieslowski worried that a public screening of the documentary might affect its protagonist.The film is 46 minutes long. An engineer from a factory in Lower Silesia faces the camera and tells the true story of what happened to him.He was a party member and worked as the factory director for nine years when he discovered that someone was stealing leather from the factory.But at first, he didn't know that these workers had ties to the local police or even the party committee.When he turned against the party, he was fired.After the film was completed, Kieslowski took certain measures to protect the engineer; whenever he mentioned a name in the film, there would be a short and loud typewriter sound, covering the on his voice.The second method is more extreme. He tried his best to prevent the TV station from broadcasting the film.In the end, he succeeded. "I Don't Know" was never played anywhere.The film begins and ends almost identically—accompanied by tango music and a subtitle that reminds us that we should hear the man tell about his own life.This means that nothing actually changed.

In Seven Women of Different Ages (Siedem Kobiet W Roznym Wieku, 1978), which won the Krakow Film Festival in 1979, Kieslowski used a circular structure.The story takes place at an all-girls ballet school: "Thursday" focuses on a beautiful little girl; "Friday" features another, older student; A girl appears at the center who looks like the young student in "Thursday" and "Friday"; "Sunday" presents us with a romantic pas de deux; It’s a rehearsal for two other students whose exhausted gasps drown out the music; “Tuesday” features a middle-aged woman who is waiting for the results of her casting, and finally, she gets an understudy;” "Wednesday" focuses on the elderly woman who teaches ballet in the kindergarten class.The seven-day week, combined with the progression from childhood to adolescence to old age, lends the film a circular structure.Over time, Kieslowski casts a sympathetic gaze on women in the dance world. (We can even catch a glimpse of Valentina in "Red" in the way the first little girl practices her moves.) Unlike the predominantly male characters in his previous documentaries, "Seven Women of Different Ages set the stage for the compelling female characters in his last four films.

Kieslowski's perspective is expanded further in Gadajace Glowy (Taling Heads, 1980), an interesting survey of Polish hopes.In this true "Hope Concert", we hear three questions asked by Kieslowski himself: When were you born?Who are you?What do you want most?Their dates of birth are stamped onscreen, from babies born in 1979 to those born in the late 1970s to older respondents.He interviewed a total of 100 Poles from the age of 7 to 100, 40 of whom were used in the film.Most of the responses sounded idealistic, passionate, and extraordinarily democratic.The funniest answer came from the last respondent: "I want to live longer!" replied the centenarian woman.

In 1988, a Dutch production company led by Dick Rineke commissioned several directors to co-direct the mish-mash film City Life, which was shot on locations including Kolkata (Mrinal Sen, the Indian director). Sen]), Buenos Aires (Argentine director Alejandro Agresti) and Houston (American director Eagle Pennell), among others.Kieslowski’s 18-minute piece, Siedem Dni W Tygodnui (Seven Days of the Week), was shot in different parts of Warsaw from Monday to Saturday.Every day will focus on the life of some different groups of people.On Monday, a man washes up (there is a knock on the door before it is finished), and then takes the bus to go to work in the factory; on Tuesday, a woman cleans the room, retracts the folding bed into a sofa, and then cleans the room for others and prepares breakfast; On Wednesday, a young man taught Russian to children and then took up a job as a typist ("Politburo holiday meeting"); on Thursday, a young woman worked as a tour guide for the American Symphony Orchestra during the day and a nurse at the hospital in the afternoon; On Fridays, the ponytailed drummer paints and paints on his sneakers and leaves them on the floor to carve out his own space in the apartment; Waiting in line at the embassy for a visa, then queuing up at the butcher's for sausages.All these people who came before were sitting together for breakfast on Sunday, and that's when we realized they were family.Three generations living in Warsaw, seven days a week, experience the problems they face every day, including difficult living conditions, heavy shift work, and bureaucracy.

Time is the essence of Kieslowski's early works. He uses hours ("Hospital"), days ("Seven Women of Different Ages"), years ("Talking Head"), life and death Loop ("Refrain") to record the passage of time.Similarly, his colleagues at the time also mentioned that Kieslowski likes to count how much film he has used and how much is left, and he is obsessed with using a frame of film to record time.As the Judaizers prayed: "Please teach us how to number our days, so that we may gain a wise heart." Kieslowski's works reflect a deep awareness: possibility depends on to the limit.