Camera Buff

(Amator, 1979)

   Krzysztof Kieślowskis first internationally acclaimed film, honored at the Moscow, Chicago, and Berlin film festivals and winner of the 1979 Festival of Polish Films. The film was exceptionally well received in Poland and praised for its reflections on the nature of filmmaking and on the social and moral responsibilities of being an artist. The deceptively simple story of Camera Buff introduces Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr), an ordinary thirty-year-old man working in a small-town factory as a purchasing agent. When his wife becomes pregnant, he buys an 8 mm movie camera to record the growth of their child. He begins his passionate affair with film by making a home movie that documents the birth and first months of his baby daughter. Later, however, he becomes the visual chronicler of official factory functions as well as an observer of everyday events in his town. The camera enables him to see more, to go beyond the facade of things, and to grow as a person and as a political being. Kieślowski produced a self-reflexive film: a meditation on filmmaking—its pleasures and dangers—and an essay about being faithful to oneself and personal sacrifice. Saturated with subtle humor, Camera Buff examines the impact of film on a life, the process of self-discovery through the arts, and the pressure of political censorship. Kieslowski's film remains one of the best-known examples of the Cinema of Distrust movement.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof