Kartoteka

A Polish man, a former partisan, engages various people in a series of existential, sometimes surreal, conversations in and around his apartment building.

This film is an oddity, to say the least. Whereas Kieslowski films are typically so carefully crafted, in terms of script and visual composition, this feels experimental, improvisational. The camera wanders around, zooms in and out, without any real precision and the dialogue, which might well have been agonisingly written, sometimes feels meandering. The production values are also quite limited (this is a Polish tele-movie after all), particularly compared to Kieslowski's later French films.

At times reminiscent of Bunuel's surrealist films like Phantom of Liberty, but without the visual set-pieces that made those films so memorable, this is nonetheless dense filmmaking that demands a lot of it's audience. While the visual style may be off-putting, there is much to absorb from the script (and probably more from the subtext). In this sense, it is perhaps more comparable to the telemovies R. W. Fassbinder was churning out in the same era.

This is will never be considered a classic, but probably deserves to be pulled out of obscurity.