A documentary revolving around the Polish situation on an industrial level at the tail-end of the 1960s: it alternates between stark images at a metallurgic foundry and a board-room meeting among the various executives involved in its management.
Fabrica, 工厂
Poland
Poland
Having seen Red, White, and Blue in past times, I wanted to explore some of Kieslowski's shorts.
The Factory, though not obviously political, is (indeed)... by its existence. It is an observation of everyday people in Poland, living under an oppressive and bewilderingly confounding system of government.
The film spends time between shots of foundry workers at their plant, and the board room conferences of the highly frustrated administrators who are trying to keep quotas up despite the unending layers of bureaucracy.
Factory has merit as a time capsule, and as a glimpse into a way of life that is alien to westerners. Kieslowski encountered pushback on this project in the form of censorship and criticism from dissidents as well. No wonder he concluded that the best way to express truth about human life was to turn to fictive creations.
one of kieslowski's first professional entries into his filmography after graduating from film school takes a look at a failing tractor factory in poland. we see workers operating on the line, as well as the higher up execs heatedly discussing many topics about the technology and conditions the factory upholds. some of the administrators want modernity and progress, some want things to stay the same, some only care about the bottom line, and some actually care about the working order of the machinery they're in charge of. the one guy was seriously rude af lol, so i can only assume he was from a financial institution that didn't want to pay up and fork over the necessary funds, or the…
Shop labor is alienated from the numbers, the origin of materials, the knowledge of job security, the goings-on of middle-crust comrades in suits, but not the cigarettes!
This documentary short film (17 minutes) is very reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s style of observational documentary making. Kieslowski and editor Maria Leszczynska cut back and forth between scenes shot on the factory floor at the Ursus Heavy Engineering Factory in Warsaw and a meeting between Party officials, factory managers and representatives of the engineers and factory workers to discuss the findings of an inspection of the factory.
As in any organisation that goes hunting for someone to blame when things go wrong and externally set quotas are not met (and you don’t have to be working under a Communist regime to find yourself in that kind of workplace), there are massive amounts of blame shifting and butt covering. Although the…
☆"We're still waiting!"☆
The first of three short films on the Criterion Collection release of The Double Life of Véronique, Fabryka ["Factory"] is one of Krzysztof Kieślowski's first professional works, made not long after his graduation from the Łódź Film School. It is a nearly 18-minute short.
You might think a black-and-white picture of a Polish factory, literally called Factory, might feature artistic shots of triumphant working-class Poles slaving for the man. Well, sort of, as those workers are the "heroes" in a way, though the film focuses much more granularly on the bureaucratic meetings and wildly inefficient processes that the white-collar bosses and administrators oversee. Kieślowski directs -- with cameras by Stanisław Niedbalski and smart editing by Maria Leszczynska…
Factory was Krzysztof Kieślowski's first professional film and it unfortunately lacks the human touch and intrigue of his previous short films and his later feature films.
"Tell me simply: either we're modernizing because we found out the old way wasn't good enough, or we've destroyed the line and need to rebuild it."
What they're arguing about doesn't matter - it's the fact that management can't get their shit together, and the workers who will pay.
Okay... I'm gonna be real here. I took a nap right after finishing this short which lasted for about 3 long hours. So, I have very little recollection of what was going on. I was tired after only having 5 -7 hours of sleep everyday so this was very needed, though it doesn't happen much.
I've said that I don't really like Kieślowski’s documentaries much and I still stand by my words. Atleast for now. It all feels really impenetrable and I'm not a big fan. I still have some left though.
Watched it on the Kieślowski documentary film DVD
We see one side talking and one side working here, and Kieślowski brilliantly captures many of the problems with bureaucratic top-heavy organizations and communist-run factories.
Starts with a group of executives arguing over equipment and operations of a factory. Cut to a steel mill where the workers are extremely close to liquid metal with sparks flying everywhere. When it cuts back to the arguing execs it’s clear that Kieślowski is making a point very clearly. The workers are doing hard, dangerous work with outdated machinery while their bosses are in a safe, clean room arguing about how to pinch pennies and why they can’t update the equipment.
literally everything kieślowski does is pure art, even this documentary about white men is great?
absolutely blasted out of my gourd on pain meds recovering from top surgery. got no clue what’s going on here. what are they even making
It’s fascinating seeing this after The Musicians because you can see some of the lessons Kieslowśki has learned from Karabasz, but also he’s still not quite there yet because he gets somewhat pointlessly bogged down in recording all of the meeting which on one level is a great thing to see but eventually, like all bloody meetings ever, begins to wear you down into boredom
