REVIEW: Camera Buff (1979)

I picked up this little film by one of my favorite filmmakers from Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski. The film is called "Camera Buff" and I watched it a few weeks back, and was instantly hooked into the film for various reasons. Here is the basic gist of it:

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 secretly submits the film to a festival in another town and eventually gains the attention of a lovely local film critic. He begins to expand hisknowledge of film, purchasing lights, and tripods and other accessories. He makes more short documentaries and enters them into other festivals. He then begins to get offers from television stations to work for them.

This in turn changes the simple Mosz into a respected artist and he finds his once fulfilling simple life kind of boring and limited. I thought this movie did a great job of displaying how art (in this case filmmaking ) can dislocate you from reality even though you may think you are the one commenting on it for the masses. It shows that art can help others deal with something painful in say a documentary, but yet can also cause you to suffer for it through lack of communication with ones own loved ones. I found it to be very true. And it was frustrating to see this man struggle with developing all his new found talents. he discovers through editing that film can also destroy things in his world and give power to those in Communist Poland. And the ending of the film can be taken many ways, but for me i found it very disturbing andenlightening at the same time.

If you are unfamiliar with Krzysztof Kieślowski's work, I would recommend this film as a good starter. My favorite of his is his Three Colors trilogy of "Blue", "White", and "Red". Also high on my list is "The Double Life of Veronique" and "The Decalogue", a ten hour movie broken up into ten one hour films. Each hour film is about one of the ten commandments. It's a really ambitious film to dive into, but you don't have to look at it as a ten hour film. Look at it as a modernized 10 episode series on the Ten Commandments...