Final Project: Alle Sieben Jahre (Every Seven Years)

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SuGY31JVgQ

Companion blog (you can click on the images for related links): http://allesiebenjahre.tumblr.com

Website Experiment (In-Class)

http://webspace.newschool.edu/~stmaa167/

Portrait of a Space: Trinity Church Cemetery

http://youtu.be/NRTjyltauNE

Documentary Report: The Office

Kieszlowski’s film The Office takes as its subject the complex machinery of a state insurance office in communist-era Poland, into which it plunges the viewer quite abruptly without explanation or context (though the latter would likely be fairly obvious to a contemporary Polish viewer).  The style appears to be influenced by early cinema vérité films such as Primary, with frequent, though slight, camera shake; some of the shots appear to have been carefully planned in advance, however, and focus and exposure are much more consistent than in some of the rougher vérité works.

Until the last thirty seconds or so, the film is dominated by medium shots and medium close-ups.  Typically we see the upper third of a figure, either the clerk or the person being served.  Sometimes the shot comprises both figures, and at times a shot-reverse-shot technique is used to alternate between them.  Full close-ups of figures are rare or nonexistent, although several are used to indicate the rituals of the bureaucrats across the glass divider: a heating coil being placed into a kettle of tea, a pencil being sharpened, a glass of tea being poured.  A few medium to full close-ups of documents in the hands of the patrons are also inserted, during interactions between the patron and the clerk.  The backgrounds are dominated by the whitewashed walls of the space, a generally drab, featureless architecture typical of midcentury government buildings.  The final shots, in which the words “throughout your lifetime” are repeated by the clerk to different patrons, show rows of near-identical file folders, crammed into wooden shelves.  The slamming of a door on the soundtrack ends the film.

From the beginning, the continual voice of the clerk (heard nearly from the beginning to the end of the film, with only occasional interruptions when those being waited on ask for clarification), with its enumeration of such seemingly needless complexities as a specially shaped stamp and a decades-long work history, dehumanizes both her interlocutor and herself.  The film’s ending brings this dehumanizing effect to an appropriate climax, creating the impression that, insofar as the workings of the supposed “worker’s state” are concerned, the average worker is a purely fungible value, to be filed and catalogued in the manner of any other useful object.  The sporadic, wordless shots of various people in the line, and the close-up shots from within the office, do serve at the same time to return a sense of humanity to these figures, and particularly to insist that the clerks are simply trying as best they can to deal with the tedium and absurdity of their work.

For such a short film, barely five minutes long, Kieszlowski does an excellent job of evoking the experience of working at and queueing in this office, and his careful editing and well-chosen shots succeed in creating a particular viewpoint rather than simply a basic documentation of the scene.  The viewpoint expressed is, all things considered, rather shockingly candid for a communist country in this era, and it leads one to wonder how widely distributed the film had been.  A touch of spirituality, particularly in the final shots of the rows of file folders, points toward later works such as the Decalogue series.

One-Minute Lumiere Film

http://vimeo.com/34115096

Soundscape (with Timothy MacBain)

Here's the link to the project I did with Timothy:

http://macbainsgradblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/soundscape.html

An Interview with Kazem Ariaiwand

I did something a little different for this project: since my initial idea fell through, I decided to take a preexisting interview and re-edit it to create a very different story.  Here are the links:


http://soundcloud.com/berroci/an-interview-with-kazim (Sound effects)

http://soundcloud.com/berroci/an-interview-with-kazem (No sound effects)

And here's the link to the original story:


http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20100219-1006a.mp3