Der Filmamateur

Filip buys an eight-millimeter movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie-making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.

"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 filmmaking, rendered dull, old, and limited.

The story is interesting solely because of the Communist aspect. If it was just a story of man who becomes obsessed with making movies, it would be just another story about movies told in the form of a movie. But the Communist aspect? If one man in town has a camera, it suddenly becomes a tool for the entire city. It's interesting. This could be beautiful or ugly, depending on who happens to be in power.

Haven't seen every Kieslowski work yet (though as of now it's close), but of what has been seen all ranges between very good (the 8th episode of 'Dekalog') to masterpiece ('Three Colors: Red' and 'Blue' and the whole 'Dekalog' series). To me, he was an immensely gifted director, who died far too early.

An early effort, 'Camera Buff' is not among Kieslowski's best work, but generally it is deserving of more love. Although Kieslowski's directing style is fairly well established, remarkable for so early on, it did become more refined later on as seen with his late 80s-early 90s work. There is a preference for the more intricate-sounding music scores of his later work, this score was the kind that worked well within the film but one doesn't have the desire to hear it on its own repeatedly, and the slightly more emotional resonant and intense work like the best of the 'Dekalog' series, 'The Double Life of Veronique' and 'Three Colors: Red' and 'Blue'.

Despite how that sounds, there's actually not much wrong at all with 'Camera Buff', just that it was done better later. This said, 'Camera Buff' is a great film, regardless of what stage it was made in Kieslowski's career.

'Camera Buff', as was always the case in Kieslowski's work, is very well made. The cinematography is minimalist, but visually striking and atmospheric as well as fascinatingly personal. As well as being beautifully shot with atmospheric use of colour to match the mood, it is gritty yet beautiful with many thoughtful and emotionally powerful images lingering long into the memory. Kieslowski's direction is quietly unobtrusive, intelligently paced and never too heavy.

It's a thought-provoking film in writing, as ever thematically rich and with complex characters, the shift from initial comedy to drama expertly done rather than abrupt and jarring. Kieslowski again proves himself as a master of narrative construction, and the whole film is thoroughly engaging and suitably challenging. The acting is as always from Kieslowski marvellously nuanced and natural.

To conclude, early Kieslowski that while not one of his best is deserving of more love. 9/10 Bethany Cox

I really liked this film because it dared to be different and it was an excellent study of psychology. This movie was about a Polish man who scraped together his money in order to by an 8mm camera to film his new baby. However, shortly after getting the camera and beginning filming his wife and child, he gets really hooked on making his little films--and seems to film almost everything around him. At first, it's fun, but then it becomes an obsession. In the process, instead of LIVING and EXPERIENCING life with his little family, he is filming them in a very detached way. However, he is so into the filming that he hardly recognizes his wife's growing anger over that ^&@#*^@! camera! Then, when his boss sees him filming and asks him to make a film for the company, his problem grows by leaps and bounds. He seems to see himself as the next great documentary maker and begins to enter competitions and send his films to the television network. To his wife's chagrin, he receives positive reviews and by this point she's lost him--they have no real life together. Where the film goes from there I will leave for you to watch. It is a fascinating psychological study of a man and his obsession--as well as the impact this ultimately has on others around him. An excellent film.

An innocent enough decision. Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) buys a camera to film his new daughter. It costs two months salary and it makes him a celebrity of sorts as he is the only one in town that has one.

Now, his boss wants him to film the 25th anniversary celebration of the company. He really gets into filming and soon runs headlong into "rules." Of course, you have rules in a communist country. His wife is not too excited about his new hobby, but he soon gets his film entered into a film festival.

Soon, like all who truly love film, Filip is attending screenings, talking to directors, and reading film magazines to improve his craft. But, more and more his wife is displeased, and his boss is cooling to the idea as he moves from filming the company to social statements.

His desire for tranquility gives way to a desire for fame and art at the cost of his wife and family.

He also discovers the unintended consequences of reporting the truth. In the end he turns the camera on himself as he realizes he had everything in the beginning and lost it all.

A fascinating look at real cinema and finding what you want.

Krzyszof Kieslowksi begun his career as a documentary film-maker. From the start, he seemed to know two things: that in the shabby, feudal bureaucracy that was communist Poland, everything was political; and that the camera is never truly neutral. It was the second concern that saw him shift into telling fictional, constructed stories; while the first, and his own struggles as a young director, inspired the subject of 'Camera Buff', his first feature. As well as its immediate subject, the film is also a fascinating portrayal of an unfashionable subject, namely the class system, alive and well in the supposed socialist utopia (Kieslowski was a great admirer of Ken Loach, so perhaps we should not be too surprised). The film starts as a black comedy in the manner of the tenth part of his later 'Dekalog', and is both very funny and immediately true to life; as it progresses, it becomes more serious but there isn't quite the emotional intensity that marks his greatest works. The score is also less remarkable than those in the films he made with Zbigniew Priesner, his permanent collaborator from the mid 1980s. But his skill at composing images that are simultaneously profoundly ordinary and starkly arresting is very much in evidence, as is the characteristic sense of an all-pervasive greyness in the lives of his characters, punctured only by shafts of colour when his hapless hero comes into contact with the affluent metropolitan elite. In Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective', a central theme is the way that the artist will stop at nothing in using their own life as material, and this is also a theme here, growing in importance as the movie progresses. It's an unusual subject for a debut, and can perhaps be seen as Kieslowski laying his cards on the table before he begun the game. Greatness lay just around the corner.