Camera Buff: Difference between revisions

Camera Buff
DVD cover for the film
Directed by	Krzysztof Kieślowski
Written by	Krzysztof Kieślowski
Produced by	Wielislawa Piotrowska
Starring	Jerzy Stuhr Malgorzata Zabkowska Ewa Pokas Stefan Czyzewski Jerzy Nowak Tadeusz Bradecki Marek Litewka Boguslaw Sobczuk Krzysztof Zanussi
Release dates	November 16, 1979 October 3, 1980 (limited)
Running time	117 min.
Country	Poland
Language	Polish

Camera Buff (Amator) is a 1979 Polish film written and directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski about a humble factory worker whose newfound hobby, amateur film, becomes an obsession and transforms his modest and contented life.

The film begins with a dream about a hawk eating a chicken.

Factory worker Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr) is a nervous new father and a doting husband when he begins filming his daughter's first days with a just-bought 8mm movie camera. He tells his wife and believes that he now has everything he ever wanted since his youth as an orphan, but when the local Communist Party boss asks him to film an upcoming celebration, his fascination with the possibilities of film begins to transform his life.

When they see his edited short film of the conference/celebration, his superiors find his shot of a pigeon useless and his shots of several negotiators at a business meeting too probing. He submits the film to a festival in another town and eventually gains the attention of a lovely local film critic.

His responsibilities to his wife and daughter slip off his radar as his gaze fixes on Anna Wlodarcz (a young, self-described "amatorka" who encourages Filip's filmmaking), various activities he films, and the world of cinephiles.

The Krakow TV station airs Filip's film about a little person ("midget" or "dwarf" in the English subtitles) who works at the factory and another one about the misallocated town renovation funds. Filip's boss gives him a talking: work on the new nursery school will have to stop because of his expose, and Stasio will lose his job.

After that, Filip gets the canister for his as-yet undeveloped new film about the brickyard, opens it and tosses the film out to be exposed to the light. Alone at home, his wife and daughter long gone, Filip turns his camera on himself.

• Jerzy Stuhr as Filip Mosz
• Malgorzata Zabkowska as Irka Mosz
• Ewa Pokas as Anna Wlodarczyk
• Stefan Czyzewski as Director

Camera Buff explores censorship in Communist Poland and its repression of the individual's expression of his observations. Filip also confronts the consequences of a man who discovers new possibilities and finds his former world, which had been so fulfilling before he'd discovered more, rendered dull, old, and limited.

Kieslowski emphasizes the power of film through various scenes in Camera Buff. Filip's moviemaking allows his grieving friend to watch a short clip of his late mother waving from a window and of himself cheerfully driving a hearst and waving to the camera. When he films the story of a midget factory worker and then shows him the result, the worker is overcome with emotion by Filip's ability to give voice and an arc to an otherwise unexemplary life. Filip finds that with its ability to create comes film's ability to destroy when he tries to air a film clip of his which aims to quietly expose Party corruption. The clip turns out to be misinformed and results in the dismissal of one of his supporters from his job, an unfortunate consequence of his uninformed reporting, the Party's secrecy, and Communist Poland's culture of censorship.

The film ends with Filip turning the camera on himself, realizing too late that all along he should have reflected on the consequences of his camera obsession on himself, his life, and his family.

The New York Times' Vincent Canby argued that " [much] of the film means to be uproariously emotional, but the events we see seldom justify all the overwrought reactions. Mr. Kieslowski also appears to suggest that art - in this case movie making - must be a process by which the artist consumes the raw materials of his experience and then spits them out as finished art, leaving the people around him in the state of gnawed beef bones. This is a vast oversimplification of the creative process and is probably only applicable, really, to the second-rater." ^[1]

• Cinema of Poland
• List of Polish language films

• Camera Buff at IMDb
• Film Reviews (rottentomatoes.com)
• DVD review of Camera Buff