CAMERA BUFF
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1994 Gareth Rees
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski Starring: Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zabkovska, Ewa Pokas Producer: Wielislawa Piotrowska Camera: Jacek Petrycki Editor: Halina Mawrocka Music: Krzysztof Knittel Duration: 112 minutes Poland 1979
When his son is born, Filip buys a Russian-made hand-held movie camera to record his child growing up. His boss discovers the camera and commissions him to make a documentary about a business meeting. In no time at all he is hooked on movie-making, rapt by the power he has to point his camera at someone and turn life into art. His enthusiasm prompts others to join him in a film club at the factory, and encouragement from professional film-makers leads him to believe that he can use his camera as a force for good, to expose corruption at his factory and in the Communist Party. What he discovers is that things the camera can make issues simple, but that it lies in doing so; life is more complicated than he had thought.
The cinematography and camerawork in CAMERA BUFF is very effective. The opening mimics perfectly the conventions of realistic documentary, resembling early Kieslowski shorts such as Hospital: the cutting is rapid, the people mutter indistinctly among themselves, the dialogue is naturalistic. This style is the simple, mimetic style of amateur cameraman Filip as he shoots his first film. As the film progresses, Filip learns more about the art of film-making, develops his own sense of aesthetic and of the duty that a film-maker has to be true to his convictions. A bereaved son is comforted by Filip's film of his mother ("A person is dead, but here she still lives") and Filip discovers that there are "things a man needs more than peace and quiet". Mirroring this internal change, the style of Camera Buff changes, becoming more consciously dramatic and cinematic. People talk in turn, give speeches; the framing of the shots is more beautiful, more contrived. By the end, when his wife and child have left him, when his personal life has been ruined and he realises that his crusade to expose corruption by making films about it was naive and misguided, the realism dissolves away completely and Filip points the lens only at his own troubled head, no longer able to see things around him with the clarity and simplicity of vision that initially inspired him to be a film-maker.
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