The expectation that audiences in other countries will speak your language is more realistic if your language is English than if it is
Polish.
To be fair, the shorts I'm thinking of were communist hack promotional stuff about hospitals and bricklaying and such, which no-one would have cared two hoots about if the film-maker hadn't turned into one of the better-known directors of the 20th C -- and changed his language of choice to French. I doubt if Kieslowski ever intended them to be shown outside Poland, and they came as a bit of a shock to someone who'd previously seen stuff like 'Trois Couleurs: Bleu', with Juliet Binoche strutting her stuff and lots of rather good fake classical music.
Ob-B7, I can just imagine Servalan, immaculate in her spotless white, commissioning 5 short films on the Joys of Bricklaying.
Tavia
Tavia wrote:
To be fair, the shorts I'm thinking of were communist hack promotional stuff about hospitals and bricklaying
Ahhh... Poles... bricklaying... can Man of Marble be far behind? I really liked that film, though it's Wajda not Kieslowski. *Who passed the brick?*.
Neil wrote:
B7 was pre-video, just about (I got the 4th Season on this thing called 'Betamax' which greying Lysters might remember),
and Julia responded:
but it *was* possible, just not widespread.
Interesting, I thought it was a bit more common than that. When season four was repeated (when was that? 1982?), I was so afraid that this might be the last chance to retain anything of "Blake" that I taped it on an audio cassette (just by sitting the machine in front of the TV - there's a bit lost in the middle where I had to turn the tape over). But I remember thinking as I did it that if I weren't so backward on the technological front I'd have been able to tape the whole thing with pictures. My family were always slow to catch up with TV technology; I think I did see B7 in colour, and my mother got a video ten years or so after that. I am happy to accept that the object I believed large numbers of fellow citizens to own may have been Betamax rather than a modern video machine; the point is that I was convinced that they were fairly normal. Maybe it was just that my friends were unusually quick to take up TV technology.
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Harriet Monkhouse -
Tavia