Camera Buff [Poland 1979]

Amator
Director: K. Kieślowski
Cinematographer: J. Petrycki

This is a much more personal film than 'The Scar', and is seemingly distinctly autobiographical. It is the story of Filip, an amateur filmmaker, and his struggle with himself and the world around him, including censorship.

The extent of character development in this movie is exceptional. As the film progresses, Filip seems to lose his sense of self and become taken over by what he is filming, but the more he forgets himself, the more we learn about him. He is full of character quirks and little details that are often only found in characters in written work.

There are two main struggles that run through the film, one psychological and one political. Psychologically, there is the struggle between a person's need to create, to make something more important than himself, and his more basic needs, which are overrun by the destructive force of his creativity. In other words, as the camera is turned only on the outside world, the director destroys himself in order to amplify the world. It is in fact the act of ultimate courage to finally turn the camera on himself, after he has been neglecting himself for so long.

The second struggle is the political one. Again Kieślowski portrays the bureaucracy in Poland in a sophisticated way. It is not portrayed one-sidedly, but rather as something with its own internal logic. While some of the censorship that takes place appears to be linked to corruption, much of it is justified by those who do it because there are real social problems created for the community when Filip ignores the censors. But this is also a nuanced point: given an atmosphere of (self)-censorship, a bit of unusual information can be truly harmful; but without the censorship to begin with, maybe full information would not have the same effect.

More generally, the political intersects with the psychological because Filip is doing what he is doing not in order to further his career or other ends, but simply to fulfil an urge; and yet he ends up being both pushed forward and held back by the political agenda of others around him. He is never really in full control; on the one hand he is pushed by his own deep need to document the world, and on the other he is pushed by the needs of others to take advantage of his talent.

Basically it is a film about film; it is a mirror held up to the director himself, full of inner conflict about the social consequences of what he is doing, whether he is really representing the world or not, and yet unable to do anything but continue.