bureaucracy
8 films tagged with “bureaucracy”
The Lives of Others
Wiesler is the best at what he does, and the film establishes this before it establishes anything else. In a lecture hall at the Stasi academy he explains, with the unhurried patience of a man describing a craft he has f…
Office Space
The TPS report entered the language because it names something with no other name: work whose only consumer is the process that requested it. Peter's error is not omitting the report but omitting the cover sheet for the…
Kin-dza-dza!
The civilisation of Plyuk speaks two words. Ku means everything; kyu is the single obscenity. Everything else — commerce, courtship, law, threat, apology — is carried by those two syllables plus tone, gesture and the col…
Brazil
A fly falls into a teleprinter and a letter is struck wrong. Archibald Tuttle, heating engineer, becomes Archibald Buttle, cobbler. Armed men come through the ceiling of the Buttle flat at Christmas, bag the father in fr…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy arrives at the institution expecting a system he can game. He is a convict, not a patient — he got himself transferred from a prison farm on the theory that a mental hospital would be softer — and he reads the w…
Dark Star
The crew of the Dark Star has been in space for twenty years, and it is important to understand what that means in organisational terms. Nobody has been fired, nobody has been promoted, nobody has received new instructio…
Playtime
To film a city that does not work for the people inside it, Tati built one. Tativille rose on waste ground outside Paris: glass office blocks on rails so they could be repositioned between shots, streets, traffic lights,…
Ikiru
The first act of Ikiru is the most precise depiction of an organisation ever put on film, and it contains almost no drama. A group of women from the Kuroe neighbourhood arrives at city hall asking that a stagnant cesspoo…