Fall 2026 REEES Film series: Lieutenant Kijé (Poruchik Kizhe)

When institutions trap the people they are supposed to serve, the only sensible reactions may be terror and laughter.

Bureaucracies are ways of organizing reality that acquire a strange autonomy as their original purposes are forgotten and compliance supplants judgement. Max Weber famously described modern social systems as an iron cage, of which bureaucracy is the highest expression – a rigid, teleological, rationalized apparatus designed to calculate efficiency, but one that tends to concentrate power in few people, and that ultimately traps the human spirit within its suffocating logic. Artistic response to this iron cage has productively shifted between Kafkian absurdism and Gogolian satire.

The series begins with the comic absurd through administrative failure, institutional laziness, and everyday shortcuts. Lieutenant Kijé (1934) sets the stage with Tsarist bureaucracy reimagined in the Stalinist era, as an error in paperwork leads officers to fabricate a reality that match the mistake. The Rainbow Formula (1966) transitions into post-Stalinist sci-fi satire, with an artificial intelligence being built to take over bureaucratic duties. In The Firemen’s Ball (1967), at the height of the Czechoslovak New Wave, the critique escalates to petty chaos and well-meaning collective failure. Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story (1983) captures institutional stagnation on the eve of Perestroika. Teddy Bear (1981) explores the convoluted workarounds of citizens and late-socialist corruption.

In the final movement, the series turns to bleaker territory. The Witness (1969) tackles Stalinist show trials with biting farce, with a citizen being puppet-mastered through promotions just to perform in a state trial. Reconstruction (1968) introduces stark, tragic realism to the theme, exposing the consequences of forced, performative acts of citizen “rehabilitation”. A Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970) pushes the theme into Kafkaesque surrealism where logic is gone. Building on the collapse of the Soviet state, Zerograd (1988) takes the previous bureaucratic absurdities – fictional people, forced performances, endless paperwork – and turns them into an inescapable, dream-logic town where history, truth, and logic have permanently dissolved.

From omnipotent committees, performative punishments and trials, inertial or ineffective clerks, inexplicable regulations, and official procedures that have lost all connection to reality or that create their own, this series charts its theme from imperial Russia to the collapse of socialist states. We invite anyone with a social security number, upon successful submission and approval of a selection of forms by a committee especially designated to the effect, to explore how filmmakers have wielded satire, avant-garde aesthetics, and dark comedy to pick the locks of the bureaucratic cage. Join us in the modern tragedy of the individual lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth!

Schedule: 

Sep 3 — Lieutenant Kijé (Poruchik Kizhe) (1934, dir. Aleksandr Faintsimmer, 87 min, USSR/Russia)

Sep 10 — The Rainbow Formula (Formula radugi) (1966, dir. Georgi Yungvald-Khilkevich, 70 min, USSR/Ukraine)

Sep 17 — The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko) (1967, dir. Miloš Forman, 73 min, Czechoslovakia)

Sep 24 — Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story (Tsisperi mtebi anu daujerebeli ambavi) (1983, dir. Eldar Shengelaia, 97 min, USSR/Georgia)

Oct 1 — Teddy Bear (Miś) (1981, dir. Stanisław Bareja, 111 min, Poland)

Oct 22 — The Witness (A tanú) (1969, dir. Péter Bacsó, 105 min, Hungary)

Oct 29 — Reconstruction (Reconstituirea) (1968, dir. Lucian Pintilie, 100 min, Romania)

Nov 5 — A Case for a Rookie Hangman (Případ pro začínajícího kata) (1970, dir. Pavel Juráček, 107 min, Czechoslovakia)

Nov 12 — Zerograd (Gorod Zero) (1988, dir. Karen Shakhnazarov, 103 min, USSR/Russia)

Event co-sponsored by REEES, the Humanities Council, PIIRS, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.