Sydney Film Festival Focus: 'Views Of A Retired Night Porter'

In the short film Views Of A Retired Night Porter (2006), which is currently screening at the Sydney Film Festival, Austrian director Andreas Horvath follows on from the 1977 short, From A Night Porters Point of View by legendary filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski. Thirty years on, Horvath catches up with the night porter (or security guard) whose day to day life formed the basis for Kieslowski’s film.

Views of a Retired Night Porter follows much the same vein as Kieslowski’s film. We are reacquainted with this fascinating character by following him throughout his everyday life. While the original film was an understated affair – subdued and very much a product of the grey era of eastern-European Communism, Horvath’s film presents us with a contemporary film both in terms of style and content. We watch the porter in his colour drenched apartment, observing him in his own microcosm as he chain smokes, watches cowboy movies, visits his wife’s grave and talks about what is wrong with the world today. The long stretches of silence and intense observation combine to provide a strange sense of familiarity and distance simultaneously. This is evidenced in a prolonged scene where we watch him eat his lunch alone at his kitchen table; the camera watches the porter in tight close-up, pulling away to reveal an elderly man alone and out of synch with the world around him.

Horvath sits back and allows the former-night porter to reminisce about the glory days of Communist Poland when strict political rule kept everything within a tight structure and left little room for social criticism or change. This is a man who reveled in the minor power he wielded as the night porter of a factory and who as a willing volunteer for the government would, as a hobby, report and fine anglers fishing without a license.

The porter is a mass of contradictions, his love of the Communist past, and vicious views on capital punishment and individual freedom collide head on with his obvious love for his deceased wife and sly sense of humour. This humour emerges particularly in his recounting of stories in which he employs transparent double standards and rationalisations for his behaviour. He tells of his love of catching fishermen without licenses and confiscating their rods while chuckling at the fact that he was caught for the same crime himself.

While it would be easy to paint the porter as a simple man who looked to the authoritative structure of Communism to provide direction and a way of life, this reading would ignore his skewed humanity which is what makes you like him even as you are repelled by his political views. Views of A Retired Night Porter viewed in conjunction with Kieslowski’s A Night Porter’s Point of View operates as a character study of a man who over 30 years has changed little and has resisted social change as much as possible. Though this man comes across as one born of structure, with no regard for individuality - these quiet films seek to show the complexitities of a man of a defined era living both within and outside his own time. These touching portraits provide a lasting glimpse into one man’s life and are well worth seeing if you get the chance.

Views Of A Retired Night Porter is screening with A Night Porters Point Of View as part of the Red Hot Doc strand at the 2007 Sydney Film Festival.